CaMP Anthropology

Is Another World Possible? The Work of Sculptor Henri Sagna

February 16th, 2016

Henri Sagna. “Un autre monde est possible,” (Another World is Possible). 2012. Rubber and acrylic on wood. Henri Sagna and Raw Material Company. 318 cm x 80 cm

by Beth Buggenhagen

With oil prices down to their lowest point since the 1990s consumers everywhere seem to be benefiting from lower gas prices. Except in Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producer and largest economy. As consumers jostle for scarce gasoline they are not only hard pressed to afford it, but to meet many of life’s most basic necessities. How is it possible that in the country that produces a major share of the world’s oil, the cost of living vexes the majority of its population? Nigeria may be a petrostate, a major oil producer whose national budget depends on its output, but most refining operations happen outside of the world’s most populated country. So while refining operations benefit from low prices for their major input, oil, oil producing countries are hurt by lower prices for their major export. As Achille Mbembe has pointed out elsewhere, “as capital expands it does not need to absorb everything in its path…it needs to keep producing or generating an exterior.” [italics mine] How is it that oil wealth in any one country puts its citizens at the exterior of global capital? How do people grapple with the experience of exteriority?

Henri Sagna. “Questionnements.” 2009. Rubber and acrylic on wood. 300 cm x 400 cm

One example can be found in the work of Dakar based sculptor, Henri Sagna. Sagna completed his studies in Fine Arts at Dakar’s Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 2005. Shortly after finishing his studies Sagna received the Premier Prix du sixième Salon national des artistes plasticiens sénégalais. Sagna works within the artistic movement of récupération that has come to be synonymous with Dakar based artists, in which artists take inspiration from discarded objects from the urban environment. In his recent body of work Sagna draws upon plywood and salvaged tires to produce three-dimensional sculptural works. The results are minimalist compositions of light and dark. The materials speak not only to perceived differences between Muslims and Christians but also to other regional confluences: the centrality of rubber to the colonization of Africa, the extractive economy of oil, the environmental devastation wrought by this industry, and the problem of waste. Sagna remarked upon his use of tires, “It is the form, it is also the material, which is black, which is derived from oil; which is a problem. But religion has also become a problem; it has brought violence, fury, spilling of blood. You get rubber from oil; you can also extract it from a tree; the oil is black, and the rubber, is black.”

Not only has Lagos witnessed an explosive growth in Pentecostal Christianity, it is also not far from one of the worlds largest petroleum reserves in the Niger Delta being exploited by Royal Dutch Shell. The impact of this extractive economy has been strikingly documented by the photographer, George Osodi, who visited the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University in 2013. Osodi’s visit was part of an initiative among faculty at Indiana University on New Media and Literary Initiatives.

How do Nigerians, and Africans more generally, exist at the center of the most intensive forms of capitalist exploitation and yet are simultaneously thrust upon its exteriors excluded from the benefits of the spread of global capital? Pressed to make ends meet on a daily basis, many turn to religious leaders for guidance. The work “Questionnements” resulted from a workshop that Sagna attended in 2010 at the Center for Contemporary Art Lagos in conjunction with the Triangle Arts Trust when he was began to notice a large number of churches as he made his way about the city.. Unlike Dakar, where churches and mosques sit in equal numbers, Sagna saw few mosques in Lagos. Curious about the nature of interfaith relations, and the turn of many Nigerians toward Pentecostal Christianity, Sagna said in our interview in Dakar in 2014 during Dak’Art, “I asked, how did that come to be? and so I cut tires into mosques and churches in the shape of a question mark.” Of this work Sagna remarked, “Churches and mosques may ask you for money, but when you ask them they may respond, ‘may God help us.”

Henri Sagna. “Valeur Marchande,” (Market Value). Rubber and acrylic on wood.

Henri Sagna, “Témoins de nôtres temps,” (Witnesses to our Times). 2013. Plywood. Installation at Musée Theodore Monod de l’IFAN. Photo by Beth Buggenhagen

Sagna has recently been selected to participate in Dak’Art 16. Dak’Art is one of the ten major biennales in the world. The Dak’Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art is an international exhibition featuring contemporary art produced by artists based on the Continent and in the Diaspora. If the second world festival of black art, known as FESTAC ’77 and located in Lagos, married “cultural tradition and fast capitalism” (according to anthropologist Andrew Apter in his book, The Pan African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria), then does the rise of Dak’Art and other biennials of the global south portend an unhinging of art and its commodity form? How does such an unhinging allow Dak’Art and other venues like it, such as the Center for Contemporary Art in Legos, to emerge not as a global marketplace for African art but as a space in which the artists speak to historical experience through their work? Dak’Art is a relevant venue not only for displaying contemporary art produced on and off the continent by artists with a shared historical and political consciousness, it is also the authoritative space from which African artists speak about Africa.

The official program of Dak’Art 16 is accompanied by more than two hundred Off exhibitions in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, showing more than five hundred artists. In the 2014 iteration, Sagna’s Témoins de Nôtres Temps (2013) was installed in the salon of African sculpture at Musée Theodore Monod de l’IFAN where the work of seventeen artists was displayed under the theme of “Cultural Diversity” and curated by Massamba Mbaye. This work consists of four-sided wooden boxes etched with differing religious symbols on each side. Some are stacked and some are hanging from an invisible thread, swaying in the gentle sea breeze. Others are resting as if they had fallen into the sand covering the grounds of the museum. All are inhabiting the same space. Through this work, Sagna prompts his audience to ask: What is the value of religion, and what questions can we ask of it and of ourselves? And is another world possible?

Beth Buggenhagen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Indiana University. She is currently working on a book on the histories of African self-imaging and contemporary reinventions of the portraiture tradition in West Africa. She can be contacted at babuggen@indiana.edu. Her review of Dak’Art 14 appears in the May issue of African Arts.
When Coca-Cola came to Totontepec

December 1st, 2015

*Official Coca-Cola video has been removed

By Daniel Suslak

en Español (PDF)

Last week Coca-Cola released a Christmas-themed television commercial filmed in the Mixe community of Totontepec, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. This is a place where I have worked for almost 20 years, studying the local language, which is called Ayöök. Ayöök is a member of the Mixe-Zoquean language family, a cluster of related indigenous tongues that have been spoken in southern Mexico for over three thousand years. Their contribution to our shared global vocabulary is the word cacao, the name of the tree whose seeds we use to make chocolate.

The commercial, produced by the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, is a gorgeous 85 second spot that highlights the luxurious greys and greens of Totontepec’s cloud forests. Local viewers will immediately recognize the faces on the screen—this is a small community, after all, with a population of around 2,000 people. There’s Josefina, who works at the hotel! And hey, that’s the former principal of the elementary school!

The beginning of the commercial notes that 81.6% of indigenous Mexican have felt “rejected” because of the language they speak. I wonder where they got this statistic from? Surprisingly few Totontepecanos feel embarrassed about their language. Still, there is no question that indigenous Mexicans are intensely discriminated against and this discrimination often takes the form of pressure to stop speaking their languages. In the 1950s when the first public elementary school was built in Totontepec, students were beaten and punished for speaking Ayöök. Even today, Ayöök is rarely heard in Totontepecano classrooms.

What happens next in the commercial is that a group of young, attractive, fair-skinned youths travel to Totontepec to deliver a message of hope… and coolers full of ice-cold Coca-Cola (one small critical note here: Totontepecanos generally prefer to drink their soft drinks at room temperature, especially in the winter). The visitors erect a Christmas tree in the atrium of Totontepec’s church, made out of painted red boards and covered with bottle-cap style lights. As the music swells, the camera pans back to reveal the lit-up Christmas tree. White teens and brown teens hug, and laugh, and consume coke products. And there at the top of the tree is a message written in Ayöök, the language of Totontepec: Tö’kmuk n’ijtumtat.

In the corner of the screen this message is helpfully translated into Spanish as “Permanezcamos Unidos” (Let’s Stay United). A slightly more literal translation would be “May all of us exist together as one.” Make no mistake, this is a fiercely Totontepecano sentiment. Underneath it says “Mixe Language.” This is the first time that Ayöök writing has appeared in a national advertising campaign or really any mainstream venue in Mexico. If we can set all of the other issues aside for just one second, this is a moment worthy of special recognition. The commercial ends by encouraging viewers to #AbreTuCorazon (open your heart) followed by the requisite Coca-Cola branding.

Reactions outside of Totontepec, especially within the world of indigenous activism and scholarship have been swift and highly critical. Tweets called the coke commercial “racist”, “neocolonial”, “disgusting.” Essentially, the complaints are two-fold: first, that the commercial engages in the most crass, stereotypical perpetuation of the myth that indigenous people need white people to come and save them; and second, that Coca Cola sucks. It sucks because the consumption of its products is linked to various health problems such as tooth decay, obesity and diabetes, and because in Mexico Coca-Cola has been guilty of working with the Mexican government to privatize water resources and of bullying small communities into monopolistic agreements that exclude other soft drink manufacturers.

Totontepecano reactions to the commercial are all over the map. Totontepecano facebook and twitter users have felt stung by the torrent of negative commentary about the commercial. Many saw the commercial as a way to promote the beauty and friendliness of their community. They are proud of their town and eager to show it off, and perhaps even to attract tourists. They are not remotely worried about their capacity to survive and thrive in a global system; and they are angry about being portrayed by outsiders as either helpless or as dupes who got tricked by a big bad multinational corporation. The money that Totontepec earned for participating in the commercial did not line the pockets of a corrupt local official. It will finance some desperately needed repairs at the local high school.

Other Totontepecanos are against dealing with any big business for any reason, period. They see this Coke commercial as selling out, and they are expressing legitimate fears about keeping their magnificent spring water supply out of the grasping clutches of Coca-Cola. Being united is one of the most important things you can be in Totontepec, which is why it is troubling that the decision to permit the shoot was not a unanimous one. Nor was it made in the transparent fashion that Totontepecanos expect from their elected leaders. The coke commercial and its fallout will be the subject of at least one upcoming town assembly. The message of unity and holiday cheer is a fine one, but not if delivering it came at the cost of actual community unity.

I myself am ambivalent. I was thrilled to see Ayöök up there on the big screen for all to admire. But I cringed when I saw all of those smartly-attired white kids running up and down the streets of Totontepec (not “storming the town” as one critic puts it. Puh-lease, let’s not lose our heads). This was a big missed opportunity to up-end stereotypes about what members of the Mexican national family look like. How about a scene with some Totontepecano kids living in the city (there are hundreds of them) asking for drinks in Ayöök, and not being rejected for doing so?

Honestly though, my first reaction was, “Oh no, not this again.” Last year I found myself writing a sharply worded response to a Vodafone commercial that targeted another one of the languages I study, a relative of Ayöök called Ayapaneco. And now this? But I’ve been giving it some serious thought, and what I think is happening here is that the awareness raising campaigns of Mexico’s National Indigenous language Institute (INALI) and other advocates are working. Large corporations are taking notice that language loss is a real and pressing concern for more and more of their customers and wondering what sort of stance to take. For better or for worse, this might be what public awareness actually looks like.

The challenge for all of us who care about the fate of indigenous peoples and their languages is to figure out how to keep these corporations honest and to push them in positive directions. One sign of Coca-Cola’s naiveté is that the original version of the commercial referred to Ayöök as a “dialecto Mixe.” Happily, the commercial was taken down and quickly corrected to read “lengua Mixe,” presumably because someone pointed out to the producers that the term “dialect” in Latin America has long been used to disparage and dismiss indigenous languages, to imply that they are something less than full, proper languages like Spanish or English. The lesson I take from this is that someone at Ogilvy & Mather or Coca-Cola was listening and perhaps willing to learn. So if this advertising campaign is more than a cynical ploy and Coke has a genuine interest in helping to make a positive change then I have a few ideas. Scholarships for indigenous students? Resources to train teachers and develop new learning resources for indigenous Mexican schools? That would certainly spread some holiday cheer.

Daniel Suslak, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, is a linguistic anthropologist who focuses on Mixe-Zoquean languages and their speakers. He studies how language serves as a medium through which people talk about the impact of economic development and globalization on their lives and how it becomes valued as a symbolic resource that people struggle to control and pass on to future generations.
“There’s no Thanksgiving Day in Jamaica”

November 25th, 2015

By Marvin Sterling

It’s Thanksgiving Week. “Thanksgiving” is an interesting idea, not just for how it’s understood in America, but in other places as well. It’s interesting as a way to think about what a society recognizes as worth celebrating, and how they perform “recognition,” including in ways meant to deepen a sense of national community. This will always involve managing silences about who belongs and who doesn’t in that community. In the case of our holiday this week, for example, silence surrounds Native Americans, whose generosity on that first Thanksgiving Day of lore have historically been unreciprocated.

There’s no Thanksgiving Day in Jamaica, where I’m from, but it’s still possible to compare the American and Jamaican cases. The fact that there are even fewer living indigenous people per capita in Jamaica than in the United States hasn’t made it any less possible for Jamaicans—at least those positioned to make these kinds of decisions—to use these indigenous people as symbols of national belonging. The Jamaican coat of arms features a crocodile atop a helmet symbolic of the British monarchial rule, beneath which stand a Taino man with a bow in his hand and a Taino woman with a basket of pineapples in one of her arms. At their feet a scroll reads Jamaica’s motto, “Out of Many, One People.”

Journalist Mark Kurlansky (1993) writes that Caribbean people have “a problem with history”. He writes this in the context of the 500^th year of Columbus’ arrival to the region in 1492. Some Caribbean peoples, he notes, wanted to commemorate this momentous event, including as an opportunity to attract tourist dollars to the region. Others see this moment not as one to commemorate, but rather to mourn, given the near-extinction of the Tainos that Columbus’ arrival precipitated. (Stress on the near in “near-extinction”: although there are very few remaining in Jamaica, and many, perhaps most Jamaicans assume they no longer exist, Tainos are not extinct.) This assumption of extinction, however, facilitates the symbolic labor the Taino perform. Taino Indians, like indigneous people elsewhere, by virtue of their presumed extinction have become very usable symbols of Jamaican multiculturalism, one that includes European, African, Chinese, Indian, Syrian, and Lebanese peoples but that ironically excludes “vanished” Taino peoples. One could argue that by virtue of the symbolic labor performed by this supposedly extinct and thus conveniently silent people, the African presence is marginalized as well. That is, as UWI Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies Carolyn Cooper has suggested in her own reading of the Jamaican coat of arms, the “One People” in question are really people of African descent, whose demographic power is strategically undermined by the neocolonial powers that be through strained and self-serving claims that Jamaica is a multicultural society.

Those who opposed commemorating Columbus’ arrival noted that in addition to the death of Taino peoples, Columbus’ arrival also precipitated that of African slaves to the region, with its own terrible history of exploitation, degradation and violence. Officially at least, this history of enslavement ended in Jamaica, Barbados, Bahamas, Antigua, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and elsewhere throughout the British Empire in 1838. So again, while there is no Thanksgiving Day in Jamaica, there is Emanipation Day. “On midnight of July 31, 1838 it was reported with great pride that many slaves journeyed to the hilltops to greet the sunrise of Friday, August 1, 1838 that symbolized a new beginning in their lives. When morning broke, large congregations joined in thanksgiving services held in several chapels and churches across the island” (http://www.emancipationpark.org.jm/about-us/emancipation-day-celebration.php). It’s hard not to bring up here the how of thanksgiving I mentioned at the beginning of this post, and the ideological why that underlies it. Is there something unseemly about black slaves presumably giving thanks to the God of the white masters who enslaved them? Jamaican Rastafarians, who oppose Christianity for its colonialist indoctrinations, might think so. But even, perhaps especially, Rastas understand that after generations of being treated as property, and then being freed, one should be, well, free to celebrate as one sees fit. These celebrations are “only” of the moment, in more ways than one. They’re only one moment, and one kind, of liberation along a longer road to freedom.

Independence is another stop along that road. Emancipation Day celebrations in Jamaica these days are usually coupled with Independence Day celebrations on August 6^th . I was in Jamaica during these celebrations in 2012, the 50^th year (more epic round numbers) of Jamaican independence. It’s already three years ago, but still memorable, more complex in a way than I can cover here. But some vivid memories, and really questions for myself (for when I finally do finish that article on the celebrations!), on the politics of performing national belonging and difference: government buildings draped everywhere in the colors of the Jamaican flag; dutiful speeches by Jamaican politicians; mento, Junkanoo, Cumina, ring game, and other folk performances all across the island; heated debates about whether the semi-official theme song of Jamaica 50, “We’re on Mission“, was, in musicological terms, sufficiently “Jamaican”; how irrelevant those debates became when it was played among thousands and thousands of euphoric Jamaicans gathered at the National Stadium; their cheers while watching on the same massive screen the victories earlier in the day of Usain Bolt and Shelly Ann Fraser Pryce in the men’s and women’s 100 meter dash, respectively, in the London Olympic Games; the dead quiet that descended upon that same crowd later in the evening as the winner of the annual “World Reggae Dance Championships”, featuring fifteen or so dance troupes of high school students from across the island, was announced to be the one foreign group, a team of dancers from Japan known as “The Japan Squad“; and word that some East Indian Jamaicans felt only marginally represented at the Grand Gala event bringing Jamaica 50 to a close.

Well, despite all that, enjoy the holidays, everyone. Next time you see me, give me a nudge to get that article done.

References:

Kurlansky, M. 1993. A Continent of Islands. Boston: Addison Wesley Publishing Company.

Marvin Sterling, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, studies the popularity of a range of Jamaican cultural forms in Japan, mainly roots reggae, dancehall reggae, and Rastafari. And more recently, he has shifted geographical perspectives from Japan to explore the Japanese community in Jamaica, one primarily centered on an interest in learning Jamaican culture at its source.
Aneesh on the publication of his new book, Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global

November 2nd, 2015

https://www.dukeupress.edu/neutral-accent

Interview by Ilana Gershon

Questions for the Author:

When you first decided to study Indian call centers, what questions did you want to explore and how did the fieldwork change your focus?

This is a good, if difficult, question about how one settles on a topic of research while ignoring many other, equally compelling, topics. My interest in India’s call centers stemmed from my first, rather unanticipated, encounter with a call center in early 2000. I was doing research on India’s software industry for my first book, Virtual Migration, and had driven from New Delhi to Gurgaon to interview a software firm’s senior manager. While being led to his office, I was struck by a rather odd and curious sight: the 1st floor office and all its cubicles were completely empty. I couldn’t help asking the manager about the absence of employees in his workplace. “Oh, they will start coming in at six in the evening,’ he answered casually. He explained that the empty part of the workplace that I saw was a call center, and workers were expected in the evening to start working during American office hours. Let’s remember that during their infancy call centers were often housed inside software firms. Some of the questions that arose in my mind were about exploring the consequences of global integrations; for example, how real-time connections across the world disconnected a set of employees from their own time zone.

Let me admit, however, that the actual plan to do an institutional ethnography of call centers materialized after a conversation with Akhil Gupta in 2004 at Stanford where I taught at the time.

The question how fieldwork changed my focus is an interesting one. Compared to 1999-2000, I found that the Indian firms had become much more secretive in 2004-05. To enter a premise, one had to swipe their ID, or, in my case, wait outside while the guard gets a nod from the reception to let me in for an appointment. Although it was still relatively easy to interview call center agents outside the premises, higher level managers were declining interview requests at a greater frequency. This lack of access inside the firm was one of the reasons why I ended up applying for jobs in call centers and working in one of them for several months. And, then, I began to realize that most of my previous interviews were as concealing of the work as they were revealing. Agents and managers tended to offer a more sanguine view of their work in interviews. But when I worked alongside they were more forthcoming. So, working at a call center not only allowed me a closer observation of the place; it also allowed people to be more revealing of their feelings and sentiments.

In this book, you talk about a number of forms of neutrality demanded by globalized market relationships – neutral accents, gender neutrality, temporal neutrality, economic neutrality, and you trace in compelling detail how much labor is required to produce neutrality, which you define as an “indifference to difference.” (p. 116) What are the social costs of neutrality, and do you see this book as an argument against neutrality?

You put it elegantly; this book can indeed be considered an argument against neutrality. I use the analogy of the alarm clock to bring out the dissonance one feels when confronted with neutrality. When the alarm goes off during the deepest sleep phase, the indifference of our schedule to our intimate bodily existence is experienced as deeply unpleasant. No wonder every alarm clock comes with a snooze button. It becomes clear that the clock was invented not for the person but for the schedules generated by modern institutions that were systemically neutral to the body. This experience of constant dissonance has become emblematic of our era as we juggle pressures from differentiated domains that may be at cross purposes with each other and neutral to the interiority of our lives. Call centers, where the diurnal body of the agent performs nocturnal work, may be a jarring representation of our 24-hour global economy. As we know now, some of their attributes — like non-standard work schedules, rotating shifts and night work—are becoming routine aspects of work in the United States. It is not surprising that prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs for sleep disorders have skyrocketed in the past decade.

I have tried to show how experiences of disconnections are directly linked to practices of connections, and how the very drive to functional integration produces specific dysfunctions. These paradoxes are easier to spot and study in India’s call centers, as they play out in the lives of call center agents and increasingly, I argue, in our own lives in the global North. Certain modes of language, labor and life now appear as obstacles to the projects of integration, and thus, must be whittled away.

One of the themes of your book is exploring how difficult it is to carry out even ordinary conversations when you don’t share the same cultural or geographical points of reference. Yet over time the Indian call workers develop quite complex, albeit limited, understandings of the social worlds of the people they are calling. Your book offers a fascinating glimpse into what you know of a country if you are working in a call center far away. Could you talk about what an Indian call worker knows about what it means to be American just from calling Americans for hours a night for months or even years, and if it matters whether the task is debt collection or telemarketing. That is, did the nature of the call shape what they know?

Perhaps a call center agent knows a little more about Americans than, say, her neighbor who has never been to the U.S. But most of this knowledge is scripted and acquired by training. But your question is right on the mark about the call shaping the agent’s perception. On the floor, by actually talking with Americans in real time, they do end up learning a little more about their customers, for instance, their sense of humor, cultural norms of conversation, racial biases, and other subtle dispositions that would not be available to someone who has never talked with an American. Some of their observations even took me by surprise; for example, most of them said that Americans were more rude than British or Australian people who also received roughly the same number of telemarketing calls. This was at odds with my first experiences in America more than two decades ago when I found people in public places a lot more polite than people back in India. I haven’t seen people saying “hello” or smiling on a sidewalk in India or Europe as we do in America. I thought the reason for rudeness must be the call itself. If an American receives a cold call during their private family time, their reaction—we can expect—would be quite negative. This sheds light on the cultural importance of privacy, which appears to be higher in the U.S. than in Britain. But this example also shows that the agent could come to wrong conclusions based solely on their calling experiences. All of us always construct the other for our own comprehension, and cannot see beyond our own cultural frameworks and available perceptual data and apparatus. Call center agents often constructed Americans as wealthy, honest, and rude, and given their limited context, they can be justified in their assessment even if it doesn’t correspond with the views of the visitors or residents in America.

You discuss a notion of algocracy – rule by algorithm – and as you develop this idea, you contrast it primarily to bureaucracy. I was wondering if you could say a little bit about how people in your fieldwork experienced the difference between operating within an algocracy and operating within a bureaucracy. What are the lived differences for people on the ground between algocracy and bureaucracy?

In 1999 when I was researching software firms in India I was struck by the fact that so much of software that we used was not developed at one place. Most of it was developed in several places at once. Different teams sitting in different continents were often contributing to the same project. I was aware of the literature on organizations where the advent of a middle managerial layer to coordinate the activities of large bureaucracies was crucial. But in the case of global software development, it was not possible to have a middle managerial layer coordinating different teams working under different labor regimes in different countries. Sitting at a firm one day and watching the work screen of a programmer, I realized that it was the code itself that was the manager. There were so many access controls built into the software platform that there was no need for a human manager. In 1998 in graduate school I had written and later presented a paper on what I called hyper-bureaucracy at the time. But during fieldwork in ‘99 it became clearer how code itself was the organization. For the lack of a better term, I coined the term algocracy, rule of the code or algorithm, instead of the bureau or office.

While deeply Weberian, the concept is quite different from the notion of bureaucracy, which was defined by Weber through such features as hierarchy, documentation, dominance of positions as opposed to persons. Bureaucratic rules always needed to be internalized by the person following them. Whether I was eligible for a particular bank withdrawal used to be decided by the person at the bank who was supposed to know the rules and conditions of eligibility. The person had to be mobilized for bureaucratic norms to be effective. But the algocratic system structures the possible field of operations without requiring the person to internalize its norms for performance. Embedded algorithms would deny or allow a withdrawal request online without requiring anyone to internalize the rules. While bureaucracies use action orientation, algocracies govern through action consequences. We don’t know Google’s or Facebook’s algorithms even as they structure our possible field of action. This is true of identities as well. Our financial identities (e.g., credit scores), medical identities, shopping identities—or what I call system identities—are all algorithmically constructed by different systems without our approval or involvement. In recent years I have been happy to see so many studies and conferences on the importance of algorithms for social life.

Conclusions can often be difficult to write, I am struggling with writing one right now. Could you talk a little bit about your writing process for your conclusion?

Conclusions are difficult to write for me as well. After completing the main body of a manuscript, I tend to run out of steam, and the idea of summarizing the manuscript’s insights and findings seems daunting. This is the reason why I don’t really write conclusions. Perhaps I shouldn’t be divulging the banality of my writing habits but here is what I have found myself doing over the years. I start a separate section where I keep depositing numerous pieces of texts that I couldn’t use in the main body for some reason or the other. At the end I cobble together a conclusion from those scattered, unused, unloved (by peers) fragments of writing.

A. Aneesh is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global is available through Duke University Press, 2015.
Making Dances—the “Outsider Art” of Pilobolus

October 27th, 2015

By Anya Peterson Royce

The Peter Pan bus from Penn Station to Danbury, CT, the A-1 Cab Company to the Homestead Inn, New Milford, CT, into an Enterprise rental car and off on 9 miles of narrow, winding roads to Washington Depot, CT., population 300, and the home of the Pilobolus Dance Theater since the early 1980’s. This became a familiar, if circuitous, route for me as I worked with the company at their home-base. The Peter Pan bus seemed an appropriately magical beginning to a company the likes of which had not ever been seen in the history of American dance.

Pilobolus was the creation of four Dartmouth students, none of whom was a dancer but who signed up for a dance class taught by dancer and choreographer Alison Chase. Wise woman, knowing that learning the fundamentals of dance technique was not going to be possible in a semester, she pushed them instead to create dances. How is this possible, you might ask, in the absence of a technique? They built a wondrous dance-scape out of their bodies, holding on to each other, making an architecture of weight, balance, and gravity that morphed through one intriguing image after another.

That was the beginning and with a few changes–the addition of two women, invitations to others to collaborate in works, developing an evening-long piece based on shadow-work, the company has retained its original ethos. Their philosophy has two tenets: the first encompasses the responsibility of the group to bring out the best in each member, forging a communal vision, and its counterpart, that the individual offer himself completely to the group, and takes responsibility for its smooth functioning and success.

The second tenet assumes that dance and all art is the province of everyone to express themselves eloquently. Technique, then, is not a prerequisite for creating dance. This two-part philosophy defined Pilobolus as a radical departure from theatrical dance in 1971 at its founding, and it still does today, into its fourth decade. “Outsider Art,” is the term Robby Barnett, founding member, used to describe what Pilobolus did, and it certainly looked like that in the context of contemporary dance in twentieth century America.

So how does this philosophy translate into making dances? “Teeth and souls bared” is how one Pilobolus dancer described the daily walk into the studio. Souls bared–allowing oneself to be known, to be vulnerable, to be transparent, holding nothing back. Teeth bared–entering into the potentially terrifying process of proposing ideas, movements and the give and take of acceptance or rejection. Speaking up with your body and your words. Taking risks, being vulnerable, trusting in the community to hold you up even when disagreeing.

Dancer Mark Santillano described this collaborative creative milieu: “So that was the creative process. It wasn’t always pretty. It was never pretty. It was always turbulent and rocky and not everybody agreed on what should go in. Like I said, everybody was very passionate about their work. Everybody was very opinionated so it was stimulating.” Robby Barnett echoes this characterization: “I think our work benefits from more heads. You need conflict. Intelligent people are going to disagree. Strong ideas will prevail. We’re not afraid of conflict.” And another founder, Jonathan Wolken, reflected “One of the disadvantages of collaboration is disagreement, and I think that no matter what you deal with, somehow controversy or conflict, the C word, is bound to creep in. The question is how do you handle it and I think we’ve managed to finesse it and handle it remarkably well, given the 39 years we’ve been practicing this strange alchemy. I don’t know why the three of us are together still. I think there’s unfinished business. There’s more to do, much more to do.”

One of the unusual qualities about Pilobolus is its encouragement of individual difference that goes right back to the founders. It brings many more ideas and ways of working to the table, even though that makes the process longer and often more explosive. But it does avoid the problems that Associate Artistic Director Renée Jaworski identifies: “if you’re in a community where everybody’s strengths are different, and everybody plays to their strengths then you get a great collaboration. If everybody’s strengths are the same, and you’re all trying to grab at the same brass ring then it’s…there’s nothing you can do. You don’t get anywhere. You just end up bumping fists and nobody gets it” (Jaworski interview, September 2009).

The Pilobolus touring company—known as P7, is small—seven dancers and a minimal technical staff. The dancers are in charge of virtually everything while on the road though they maintain contact with the administrative staff and artistic directors back home. Dancers stay with the touring company anywhere from two to nine years, with five or six being the norm. When dancers leave, they have to be replaced and, again, Pilobolus charts its own course. It does not have a school which, like other companies, can be a feeder. It does not have its own recognized technique which is another way of choosing dancers. So what does the audition process involve? Auditions are by appointment only. The first call is two days, one day for women, one day for men. They will usually get 200 to 300 dancers for one or two positions. There are then two days of call-backs when the numbers have been winnowed down to perhaps a dozen at the most. What are the hopeful dancers asked to do? Run—the prolific minds and bodies of Pilobolus directors and dancers have invented dozens of running exercises that rather quickly separate dancers who may be possibles from those who are not. When you have 200 people in one studio all running, it takes a real kinesthetic awareness to run smoothly without bumping into anyone. They are asked to run slow, run fast, run low to the floor or high on the balls of their feet. And then they are asked to flock, following a leader and changing leaders. Starlings do this really well, hence the phrase “murmuration of starlings” to describe the beautiful wheeling actions of large flocks of birds. Humans are not naturally good flockers and in these auditions, they do not have the help of aural cues which seem to be part of bird behavior. What seems to distinguish a good human flocker is a refined kinesthetic sense of her own body in relationship to all the bodies around her. Jumping is then added to running, and, finally, individual dancers do short improvisations and some partnering work.

The dancers who survive this initial four day process are invited to Washington Depot where they spend days and nights with the company members, artistic directors, each other, and locals in the big studio with the seasoned Piloboleans, and at meals, breaks, wandering around the very small town. At the end of this, the company members, directors, and executive director talk and make their choices. Pilobolus dancers are chosen because the company sees something in them that will bring fresh ideas and different ways of moving. A premium is also placed on the willingness to engage in the conversation of ideas and bodies with a genuine commitment to everyone in the conversation. A Pilobolus dancer has to like working in a close-knit community as a colleague, not a competitor, someone who has the capacity to listen to the other voices and be changed. Dancers speak about being supported and nurtured by other more senior dancers when they first joined—being helped in learning the repertory, in negotiating their way in this new context. It is like no other dance company I know, and this philosophy allows them to create innovative, imaginative work that sits well in their bodies because they have collaborated in creating it. Each dancer has a profound investment in maintaining the freshness and vitality of the repertory. It allows them to be models of what can be accomplished through collaborative, engaged work and play. They can step outside the confines of ego and become part of something larger (see Csikszentmihalyi 1990).

This environment does not just happen. And it is always challenging to immerse oneself in it: “we ask ourselves every day, to do something seriously challenging… and that is to open [ourselves] up, without protection, to the peril and the power of the unknown…. It requires of everyone courage and commitment and a lot of energy and attention, and the risks are real, but it’s what every artist does and the rewards are unique” (Barnett, personal communication).

Whether they come to Pilobolus from one of the better represented dance genres or from another background altogether, their time in the company teaches them movement qua movement. In a conversation with Renée Jaworski, she describes her own experience coming to Momix, then Pilobolus, from a background in Graham and Limon techniques: “When someone said “Pretend you are not a dancer,” it opened up my imagination to almost a visual rather than a physical art. So I started to step out of my body….It became much more visceral and tactile just as if layers piled on themselves.” This is not the same thing as the versatility that comes from training in a number of movement genres. Seasoned Pilobolus dancers command a much fuller understanding of how the human body can move and particularly how it can move in collaboration with other bodies. Their partnering does not derive from a mechanical knowledge of how bodies should move together but rather springs from a physical sensibility. Appreciating the range of innovative movement from the company dancers, P7 veterans bring to their choreographic endeavors a sense of what works both in terms of movement and in terms of narrative, at the same time that they are open to ideas that come out of nowhere. Many of these ideas that become movement kinemes are immortalized in names assigned by the group that created them: “Body flossing,” “galloping sofas,” “the flag,” “Ellington sack carry,” “face-to-face and back-to-back greyhounds, and dozens more.

These are not terms we associate with a technique. So, in making dances, what is the role played by technique? Technique in most companies trumps personalities and spirits. Dances are built out of technique which functions like a grammar; you build movement phrases like you make sentences, then paragraphs, then stories. In traditions with a specific technique, new dancers come into an established repertory of performances with an instrument that has already embodied a codified movement system. Learning the repertory means learning sequences of steps built into longer movement phrases. No other company I know would say to a dancer, “pretend you are not a dancer,” as Pilobolus said to Renée. [I do know of another case where a choreographer took this position: Rita Moreno recounted her experience during the creation of West Side Story when Jerome Robbins directed her to go to the window. After a few attempts, he burst out “Don’t dance to the window; walk or run, but don’t dance!”] Jonathan had important observations about the role of technique: “the techniques dancers have are inhibiting because they’re used to certain steps, certain things. They’re used to being upright and we really are spherical. You know, you’re as likely to be sideways as upside down as on your feet. A lot of what we do that deals with weight sharing, and that’s only a small part of what we do really. It is odd for many dancers because the center of gravity is not in your body. It’s some other place and not necessarily in anyone’s body with whom you’re dancing. It’s a physical thing that manages to keep the whole structure together and that’s so odd for dancers who are used to being aligned and knowing where their center is and balancing themselves in particular ways. So it’s tricky, but I think when you come into the company you really shed all of your previous technique. It won’t help you. It will get in your way” (Wolken 2009). Another founding member, Moses Pendleton, called this “collective muscle” in an April 1977 interview with Alan Kriegsman for the Washington Post.

With dancers who do not share a common technique, and in the absence of a single directorial voice, how does Pilobolus makes dances? The artistic directors have explained their process at various times over the long history of this company, displaying a remarkable consistency across the years. In a November 6, 2008 interview with Dennis Coleman, Robby Barnett offered: “our works are built from the bottom up with a physical vocabulary that is developed through a process of invention and discovery, reflecting some fundamental priority of content over form rather than designing a structure and then filling out its predetermined volume.” Jonathan Wolken, in June 1999 interview at American Dance Festival, said “Collaboration is self-affecting, limited chaos, pulling the knowable out of the unknowable….By end of the second week, the material seems to begin to connect and you can begin to focus on one theme. Reduction is the process…. Things that are convincingly right don’t need any discussion.”

New dancers, new partners, new venues, and new mediums. Add to that heady mix, the particular passions of artistic directors and collaborators, and Pilobolus is unlikely to run out of new ways to make dances.

https://vimeo.com/113564164

PILOBOLUS WEBSITE

Anya Peterson Royce, Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, has followed the Pilobolus Dance Theater as a fan since the 1980’s and as an ethnographer since 2008. Tracing the communal story of Pilobolus allows me to document a creative process that combines the freedom to play and invent with the discipline and vision to distill works of artistic merit out of that seeming chaos. For that and them, I am grateful.
Performance and Poetry

October 19th, 2015

By Jennifer Meta Robinson

On a glorious October Saturday recently, a group of unusual people gathered at our farm. Seven of them were poets, or at least the day’s official designees of the title Poet, and about 93 of them constituted the audience. A few of them were The Band, and a good dozen were children under ten, conscripted but relishing their numbers.

We met in our barn in rural Greene County, Indiana, where tools of digging and chopping and gathering line the walls and the sheds are full of the drying harvest—flowers, broom corn, colorful grinding corn, garlic, winter squash, pumpkins. The bounty on this day, though, was a community gathered around the creative spoken word. A flatbed wagon filled with food and drinks, and the poets took their places out back, at the opening to the field.

This was an unusual gathering. One person had politely declined my invitation saying, the Goddess did not give him a love of poetry. And indeed, although the popular consciousness is now so much interested in invention and disruption, very little of it has much to do with poetry.

Still, the crowd gathered to enact the performance of poetry—the communion of words and worlds that requires both a telling and a hearing, bodies and hearts. The poems, like the news-sharing before and after, were beautiful but sometimes chosen to shock, and they did not always tell about beautiful things. But they were always powerful: judgmental neighbors with astroturf aesthetics, fathers who rarely spoke, achievements that become little more than dreams in the rearview mirror, children, lost children, “loss button” mothers, gardens, bees, fruits, and foods.

The poetry was by academic poets—Ross Gay, Catherine Bowman, Alessandra Lynch, Chris Mattingly, David Watters, Wendy Spacek, Sue Cho. They are employed to write in ivory towers, but they are poets you bump into out in the world—at the community orchard, at the farmers’ market, in the New Yorker, engraved in public art, on the baseball field. This time we met them outside of the usual poetry spaces of lecture halls, classrooms, art galleries, and front rooms. Out in the open air, night rapidly falling so that Alessandra had to borrow a light-up hat from a spelunker in the audience to finish her sequence, we sometimes had to strain to hear over the jubilant pack of children, the car wheels on the gravel road, the bugs, and evening birds.

It was a cold night but a warm medium. We shared homemade vegetable juice, bean dip, lemon squares, and much more. The audience sat on crates used to ship bareroot plants in the spring. It felt like the poetry itself was planted, in a new place among a new community made up of farmers, school teachers, artists, writers, grandmothers, gardeners, sewers, bakers, students, docents, carpenters, dumpster divers, coffee slingers, small business owners, homemakers, guitar players and drummers, critics and comrades. It felt like we all made a thing that we could harvest and taste, bring to a potluck.

The performance was a collective affair as we expected. But we did not know quite how we would circle around the poets on our crates. Or that children would be drawn to the speakers, going up to hold their hands and sit in their laps and carry their poems off. We did not know that we would lose the light to read, as we did, or find it again in the Milky Way.

Media clips of interest:

Catherine Bowman performing “Makeshift”: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/makeshift-2

Ross Gay performing “To the Fig Tree at 9th and Christian”: http://www.nereview.com/tag/ross-gay/

Jennifer Meta Robinson, Professor of Practice in the Anthropology Department at Indiana University, has worked on ethnographies of the local food movement for a decade, focusing on sense of place, identity, and community. She lives with her husband J.A. Hartenfeld, a 35-year farmer, in Greene County, Indiana.
Dancing Bodies and Rhythmic Identities

October 16th, 2015

by Gabriel Escobedo

I am a third-generation Mexican-American. My earliest memories were in the house of mi abuelita. I remember the constant sound of music and television in Spanish. When I was 4 years of age we moved. We still lived near other Mexican-Americans at this time, but it was not long until my mother and father saved enough money for us to move out of there as well. At the age of 7, we settled in a predominately White-American suburb in Arlington, Texas. There was no longer anyone who looked like us or spoke like us, and my parents wanted me to fit in.

I had no means of talking to anyone other than my grandmother and sometimes my parents since it was the only time I could freely speak Spanish. I could no longer communicate with my own heritage and culture. Except for when I spoke through my body. When I danced to salsa, bachata, merengue, and cumbia I was Latino again. The irony of it all was that because of how I moved I could be from any part of Latin America I so choose. I did not have a specific Mexican identity; instead I could be as many different types of Latino as I wanted, so long as the music covered my voice.

Over time, I found others like me; the silent ones, the in-betweeners. They reached out to me for some reason unbeknownst to me. I could not teach them all the Spanish I had just re-acquired or teach them all our culture when I am still learning more about it everyday. What could I do? I could teach them to dance! It was my ticket into a world I thought I would never know. So I did, I created a whole program through IU’s Latino Cultural Center, known as La Casa. Paso a Paso is a cultural program dedicated to educating the Bloomington, IN community about Latino culture through dance.

I was dedicated to helping as many of those like me as possible, those who were lost. I was so eager to put on this program and help the Latino community I almost missed the most important reason I dance. I did not want to let anyone feel the anger, despair, hopefulness, and utter frustration I felt just going up to people who I called family, let alone those who share in my image. I dance because I feel like I am a part of something greater than myself when I do, I feel as if I am whole again, I feel accepted.

It is a week before my first workshop for Paso a Paso and I am spamming IU’s email servers with my flyers, I am going into classes and hanging up flyers so that at least one person can come to my event. That is when I spoke to my advisor to make a quick call out to the Anthropology of Dance class. My classmates seemed interested, at least I hoped so, but there was one person who was disheartened at my entreaty for everyone to attend.

Her name is Sally, and she uses a wheelchair. She told me that she would love to come but she can’t “move the way” I do. In that moment, my past was reflected in her eyes; mirror’s curse and blessing. I told her, “Don’t worry! I know exactly how to teach you to dance!” I lied. I had no idea. But I couldn’t let her feel the way I have felt. I can never let anyone feel that way again if I have the means to do so. Exclusion to some is exile to others. At the edge of oblivion in the minds of those who feel isolation, a single step in either direction can change the whole dance. It might as well be to a rhythm.

I scoured the Internet for someone who has done this before, but there was no one. Anything I found was a routine that was choreographed, rehearsed, and performed. That isn’t what I wanted. I wanted expression. I want the dancer to do what he/she wants in the moment before the moment disappears because in the fleeting instant he/she is making a choice what to do and who to be.

So I worked every passing second on a way for her to learn to do Latin dance. I spent what seemed like forever creating a method to teach her to be a part of a community she thought was lost to her. Hours and hours creating scenarios for every possible question, concern, and issue that she had. I looked up different wheelchairs and their mechanics.

Finally, the day came. Sally and her partner John came to my program. I discussed the history of Latin Americans coming to the U.S., I focused on a particular dance known as Bachata, and I discussed how it has gained popularity over time. As my other instructors began teaching the basics I worked with Sally and John, making sure they were also paying attention to what was happening around them.

My standing/sitting partner pair was ready to dance. I developed a series of non-verbal hand gestures that could effectively communicate the direction of the dance. This method also allows for incorporating underarm turns and accounts for time disparities when keeping up with the beat. Sally and John could dance. Their faces were in utter disbelief. Joy radiated from their bodies. The embodiment of acceptance, of laughter, of wholeness, of delighted identity all emanating from what some thought wasn’t a perfect body.

I wish I could elaborate more of the details of my method and show images of the performance but you must wait. I am currently working on an article to show what was done that day and I have already created an instruction video in conjunction with the future publication that I will use to teach others how to socially dance to Latin music without routine. I will be discussing challenges, body mechanics, what to look out for, safety, and how to never let anyone take away something that is part of you.

This experience has changed the way I think and feel about dance. All my preconceived notions of what dance was and who can dance are gone. One thing, especially for me as a hot-blooded stubbornly prideful Latino male, is the change in roles of partnership. My next entry will be focused on partnership between standing and sitting partners.

Gabriel J. Escobedo is a PhD Student in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University. He focuses on dances from Latin America and how U.S. Latino youth utilize these dances to form identity. His current work focuses on Bachata dance and its recent growth it popularity and legitimacy.
Conchita Wurst Comes to Kyrgyzstan

October 7th, 2015

“Conchita, Conchita” the boys squeal. I am standing in a gay night club in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. I glance behind me, and sure enough, there she is – Conchita Wurst. Never mind that she looks less than glamourous in her frumpy brown calico frock. Or that she is a little on the short side, and most definitely Asian. She is Conchita incarnate, with her straight black hair reaching down to her waist and her little more than five-o’clock-shadow beard. The boys whisper as she passes us. Throughout the night, the squealed refrain is heard again and again. She never graces the stage, but rather wanders about, talking and flirting with various boys, giving a lap dance or two. Eventually, the dress and wig come off and she is just another gay Kyrgyz boy, albeit with a painted on beard.

Conchita Wurst, the stage name and persona of Austrian singer and EuroVision contestant Tom Neuwirth, was the transcendent hero of the spring and summer of 2014. The EuroVision Song Contest is an annual transnational singing competition held among the members of the European Broadcasting Union. Both highly entertaining and highly political, it is perhaps best described as the Olympics of pop music. I had followed EuroVision a little on Facebook from Bloomington, Indiana. My Austrian roommate had been the first to point out to me that a drag queen or a trans woman or an intersex woman or a bearded lady or whatever Conchita Wurst really was (and there was plenty of debate) would be Austria’s contender, and it took a little while for me realize that she would be far more than a novelty. Rather, Conchita would become emblematic of a global battle for the right to queer expression. Not gay expression, not even trans expression, but queer expression. Conchita was someone who could pull off the combination of beard and pretty dress – the archetype of “genderfuck” – and do it in a way so seamless, so natural, that one hardly realized she was fucking with gender at all.

As EuroVision commenced, the internet was ablaze. The voting, in particular, became the moment where her importance began to emerge for me, where she was not the sideshow but the battleground. Where Conchita equaled queer equaled freedom equaled Europe, and Ukraine’s voting was of particular interest – which way would it sway? A vote against Conchita was viewed ideologically as a vote for Russia, a fact that was highlighted most clearly in votes for the Russian contestant. The Cold War had reemerged writ large on the svelte body of an Austrian drag queen.

In addition to EuroVison, spring of 2014 saw the introduction of a bill that would create a gay propaganda law in Kyrgyzstan, a law that was broader in scope and harsher in punishment than the Russian law passed in 2013. This law would criminalize anything that fosters, “a positive attitude toward non-traditional sexual relations, using the media or information and telecommunications networks” and would be punishable by both a fine and up to a year in prison. This came after a series of events beginning in January of 2014 that increased the visibility of LGBT people in Kyrgyzstan. First, the Human Rights Watch had held a press conference in conjunction with the release of a report detailing 40 instances of police brutality toward and extortion of gay and bi men in Kyrgyzstan. One of the speakers was a Kyrgyz LGBT rights activist, who publically came out as gay. The next day, the then-acting Grand Mufti, Kyrgyzstan’s highest religious authority, released a fatwa paraphrased as “if you see a gay, kill him.” Violence against LGBT people escalated, and in February, a mob gathered outside the US embassy and burned the photograph of a pro-Ukraine activist who was rumored to be gay.

It was against this backdrop that I returned to Bishkek in May and that Conchita really began to mean something to me, and then only through what she meant to other people. Before, she had largely been a sensationalistic singer singing a mediocre song, interesting for what she said about international politics. I was interested in her in much the same way I had been interested in Finnish monster band Lordi several years before. However, as I would encounter her again and again in Kyrgyzstan, brought to life by a Russian man from Russia who performed at the talent show at the LGBT Summer Camp; or by the Kyrgyz boy giving lap dances at the gay club in Bishkek; or simply in her tune, “Rise Like a Phoenix,” hummed defiantly on the jailoo (summer pasture) or the alleys of Bishkek, I began to see her as a beacon of hope, and as a figure who was intimately relatable to Kyrgyzstan’s feminine gay men.

Conchita’s relatability surprised me at first, for in the United States, Conchita’s appeal came in part from the very fact that she was not relatable, that no one knew quite how to categorize her or even make sense of her. Although she was the stage persona of a gay man, the term drag queen did not seem quite applicable, in part because of the presence of the beard, and in part because without the beard she could totally pass as a woman. She was over-the-top, but in all the wrong ways.

This in between status, this ability to resist categorization is, I believe, precisely what made Conchita so accessible and relatable in Bishkek. In Bishkek, many gay men straddled the line between cis and trans, neither binary nor non-binary, men who were somehow exempted from womanhood (including trans womanhood) and yet not really men either, but at the same time, neither bigendered nor agendered. Conchita was a physical representation of the condition that defined their lives, feminine manhood as separate and distinct from trans womanhood. She proved that one could have a beard and a male body and still be the pinnacle of femininity. There was nothing masculine about Conchita, and yet she was not a passable woman.

That summer, anyone could be Conchita. You did not have to be pretty, or be able to pass. You did not have to be thin, or glamourous. You only had to be recognizable, and all that took was the juxtaposition of a wig and a beard. And who wasn’t Conchita, rising from the ashes, defiantly telling the writers of propaganda laws that we too will prevail, that self-expression is worth standing up for, that ultimately, gender is made to be fucked?

Samuel Buelow is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on LGBT issues in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. His current work focuses on Kyrgyz “crossdressers” – men who look like beautiful women.
Beyond the Red Carpet of the Film Festival

September 28th, 2015

My fieldwork takes me to Toronto each fall to observe and participate in the flurry of activity surrounding the Toronto International Film Festival. I attend many film screenings, but what I see at the festival is not just the stories projected on the screen. I listen to the audience members who come to celebrate film and watch the aspiring filmmakers as they find voices of their own. And each year, I’m reminded of the thin lines between the opulence of the festival activity and the austerity of many guests’ experience. Film industry and media representatives invest their money, time, and effort in the festival with the hope that it will further their career or allow them to break into a new career. In 1955, the early history of international film festivals, film critic André Bazin describes the experience of journalists as akin to a monastic order,

“Film writers come together from all corners of the globe to spend two weeks living a life diametrically opposed to their everyday professional and private existence. In the first place they come as invitees’, experiencing comfort but nevertheless a degree of austerity (the palaces are reserved for members of the jury, the stars and producers)” (2009).

Little has changed in the rituals of film festivals. I can see the kind of austere measures even those with steady festival work enact in order to attend the festival and do their work.

For instance, I was in the press lounge one afternoon—a tight space with plastic furniture, too few computers and outlets, and complimentary coffee and water to keep the occupants going—catching up on some work. Everyone was typing feverishly, recording their thoughts of the day’s festival news. Around 3:15 snacks were brought in for everyone—chips, pudding cups, and other “grabbable” items. By 3:30, they were gone. I didn’t think much of it at first—just that it was a nice gesture on the part of the festival organization and it was a nice bonus for the press reps. But then, around 4:00, several people arrived to the lounge and were dismayed that the snacks they had been told would be available at that time were already gone. One woman left exclaiming, “now what am I going to do?” It hadn’t occurred to me that—whether money or time (potentially the more valued currency of these journalists)—they would rely on the minimal offerings to get by.

The strict management of time and money are austere in the hope that they will lead to future opportunities. There are many stories of actors and directors who risk their income and more stable opportunities to reach the status that they have. At film festivals, I see these stories play out. Leo Howe describes this kind of risk as “contingent” risk in that the risk lies not in the current performance of an action but in its outcome and the hope for future performances (2000). Volunteers, filmmakers, journalists, and many others scrape together enough time and money to attend, putting themselves in financial risk to do so.

One friend, who had spent so much time and money attending TIFF and other festivals as an aspiring media journalist, found himself relying on friends for a place to live. His apartment lease had lapsed and in the little time he had off work—his primary income—he could either continue hustling to change his career or he could find a new apartment in the increasingly high-priced Toronto area. Banking on potential work, he slept on couches, hotel room floors, and, on occasion, in a local flophouse or on a cold park bench. While his connections and persistence eventually paid off, it was a risk that he and many others are taking when they bet on the festival’s promises of connection and development. Young filmmakers, actors and even small-scale producers find themselves in the same situation as they live or travel to the city—relying on their parent’s help, overextending credit cards, or saving costs by housing 10 crewmembers in a tiny hotel room.

At other times, the goal isn’t about furthering careers. It is simply for the experience of the festival and the friendships that develop between those who attend.

Another friend has attended the film festival for about twenty years. I had the pleasure of meeting her on my very first day at my very first TIFF attendance. I fortuitously sat beside her at the world premiere of Jennifer’s Body, the opening film for the 2009 Midnight Madness Program. We started chatting, and she was extremely informative about the festival, the program, the movie, the sponsors, and anything I asked about. She introduced me to some of her fellow Midnight Madness attendees who would take turns getting in line very early so that they could all be at the front of the line and subsequently get the seats they wanted when it was finally time to go into the theatre. She invited me to join them the next day. I was a little hesitant, but after chatting with her at subsequent screenings and getting a feel for the crowd, I joined her and the others at the front of the line. They became my TIFF host family of sorts. For the rest of that year and those to come, we would check in with one another and then meet up in the evening to see the latest Midnight Madness flick.

This year, however, I learned that this loyal TIFF-goer wasn’t going to be attending Midnight Madness. She didn’t explain right away, but when we ran into one another on the first day, she elaborated. It had been a tough year. In January she had lost her job and then couldn’t afford her apartment. The mental anguish led to a stay in the hospital, and while she was now feeling better, she was still too strapped for cash to attend the festival as she had in years past. With the help of some friends, she was able to see some films—and she is hopeful that in the future she will be able to return on her own—though she may be pickier about what she chooses to see.

Over the years, several people from that Midnight Madness crew had not attended in particular years because they couldn’t afford to take time off work or didn’t have a job at all. They recognized that the festival was not necessarily essential to their physical well-being, but it was a time to reconnect with friends who shared the love of cinema in a way that they couldn’t do the rest of the year. They missed this time with friends and were missed in turn by those friends.

These friendships are part of the festival experience which itself becomes the kind of “flow” state Csikszentmihalyi describes:

“People who enjoy what they are doing enter a state of ‘flow’: they concentrate their attention on a limited stimulus field, forget personal problems, lose their sense of time and of themselves, feel competent and in control, and have a sense of harmony and union with their surroundings. To the extent that these elements of experience are present, a person enjoys what he or she is doing and ceases to worry about whether the activity will be productive and whether it will be rewarded.” (1975)

TIFF is an annual highlight for me and many others. Thousands of people work at the festival, tens of thousands attend the festival, and the local economy boasts millions of dollars in direct and indirect revenue because of the festival. But for many, there is a price of attendance that extends beyond the cost of a ticket. There are risks and sacrifices made to stay connected with friends or further one’s career. The flashing cameras and smiles on the red carpet draw much of the attention at film festivals, but just beyond the velvet ropes are the people of the film festival, those who attend the festival and those who work to make the festival happen, risking much for the experience itself.

References:

Bazin, André. 2009. “The Festival viewed as a religious order” In Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals. Translated and Introduced by Emilie Bickerton. Edited by Richard Porton. London: Wallflower Press. Pp. 11-22.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. 1975. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Howe, Leo. 2000. “Risk, Ritual, and Performance.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 6:63-79

Sarah Mitchell is a graduate student in the Anthropology Department at Indiana University. Her work focuses on Canadian film culture and the Toronto International Film Festival. She is currently steeped in the process of dissertating.
Is the Ideal Job Candidate Flexible? How Flexible?

September 21st, 2015

by Ilana Gershon

For the past two years, I have been researching hiring in corporate America. One of the things I am trying to figure out is if in practice people truly value or accept all that a neoliberal self is supposed to be – maximally responsible for one’s own fate and circumstances, flexible, embracing risk, ever enhancing their skills, experiences, and alliances, and so on. When you turn to moments of hiring, you are turning to the moments when people are supposed to be thinking of themselves most in market terms – they are supposed to be present their selves as though they are a product or a business that another business would like. LinkedIn these days is the social media tool that many people throughout my fieldwork insisted was essential for this self-presentation. Yet even LinkedIn, in its affordances, can reveal that for the neoliberal job-seeker, flexibility sometimes comes into conflict with legibility. As I found out by attending Bay Area workshops on how to create your LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn’s very interface can discourage you from presenting yourself in as general a way as possible.

This came up in the first job seeking workshop I attended. Aurora, a middle school substitute teacher, wanted to start working for non-profit organizations instead of teaching, she thought that maybe working for Doctors Without Borders might be more satisfying. But she wasn’t sure, there were other job possibilities she was willing to explore instead. She went to the workshop to learn how to start using LinkedIn. The workshop was filled with seven or eight women, most of whom did not have a LinkedIn profile before the workshop. Bella, the instructor, had to explain step by step how to fill out each part of the profile. One of the first things that you have to do in filling out your LinkedIn profile is to choose the industry with which you would like to be associated. When Aurora realized that LinkedIn only allowed you to choose one industry, she asked if there was a way around this.

Aurora: Okay, it is making me choose an industry.

Bella: Yes, you have to choose an industry.

Anastasia: Okay, I have another question – the industry, there are a lot of, uh, I can see a lot of industries. What if I want to put three, four, five industries?

Bella: No, you have to pick the one that is most closely associated with what you are looking for. . . .

Orli: I am wondering about Aurora’s question. My recent jobs were in personal training, but that’s not what I am looking for at all.

Bella [stares at the projected image of her own LinkedIn profile and points to the section immediately under her name]: Okay, your headline. It is important what you use for your headline. Think a little bit about Match.com. It is a little bit like you want to give them a good idea of who you are, so not just a job title. It doesn’t have to be just one job title. It can be more. So like I have trainer, instructor, facilitator, and I think I say, um, social skills, curriculum design and social skills. So I have a pretty long title that gets everything in there. So other people will do like more, I guess, creative titles. So you’re a program coordinator, right, so you could do “program coordinator serving the non-profit arena.” Right, unless you don’t want to limit yourself, but if you want to limit yourself – say, that is my goal and I want people to know, then you can put it right in the title. Right? So your title is kind of a way to catch people’s eyes. It is going to come up in the searches, you know, keyword searches. So your title is important.

Aurora: So having a lot of things won’t turn people off?

Bella: As long as they are all related. If you say: “I want to do landscaping and administrative assistant” then, you know, that would like “what???” So mine are all related. They are different names for the same thing – trainer, instructor, facilitator. It’s a different name for the same thing. And because of that, I kind of have to put all of them in there in order to come up in searches.

Aurora: Okay. So it is possible to have, um, more than one LinkedIn account?

Bella: No. You can have two LinkedIn accounts but when I search your name, they are both going to come up. And when I see two, I am going to go: “what the hell is wrong with this person?”

Aurora began almost immediately to see a mismatch between how she wanted to use LinkedIn to help her find jobs, and the type of user the LinkedIn menu options presuppose. Aurora thought that there were a wide range of jobs she would be happy to take, she didn’t want to restrict herself to an industry in advance. She also quite reasonably saw classifying herself in terms of an industry as a statement about the kinds of jobs she was looking for, not the kinds of jobs she had in the past, and she wanted to keep as many options open as possible. The LinkedIn interface, by contrast, in requiring people to choose an industry, is asking users to classify, and thus limit, their professionalizing commitments. In short, problems about how flexible you can be as a job-seeker came up within minutes of trying to fill out the profile.

Bella, the workshop leader, and LinkedIn are in accord on the need to limit oneself (at least in the LinkedIn of 2013) – you should only focus on one industry when you are looking for a job. It is in these workshops when widespread expectations about how to use LinkedIn will get stated clearly and firmly to people frustrated by the ways in which the LinkedIn interface might not allow them to represent their distinctive circumstances the ways they want to for potential employers. Aurora wants to be maximally flexible in terms of the jobs she might want to take. And Bella uses LinkedIn’s limitations to re-affirm what she also strongly believes – too unfocused of a job search wastes time. Even in the moments when an overarching ideal of the flexible multi-skilled applicant is in the air, when actually constructing a LinkedIn profile, asserting this type of flexibility can be undesirable. Being flexible can clash with being an identifiable category, in this case, an easily interpreted potential employee, causing some job seekers to puzzle – how should you use LinkedIn? How flexible can you in fact be in the contemporary U.S. imagination of the “job market” where a person must create, above all, a “marketable” self?

Ilana Gershon is a professor in the anthropology department at Indiana University. She is interested in how new media affects highly charged social tasks, such as breaking up or hiring in the United States. She recently published an edited collection of imagined career advice for real jobs around the world, including chapters on how to be a professional wrestler in Mexico or a journalist in Buryatia — A World of Work (Cornell University Press, 2015).