CaMP Anthropology

Mara Green on her book, Making Sense

February 17th, 2025

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/making-sense/paper

Timothy Loh: Thank you so much for this wonderful and incisive book! It’s such an exciting contribution not only to deaf anthropology and sign language studies but also to the broader study of how language makes personhood and sociality. I was particularly moved by your concluding story about how one of your interlocutors, Parvati, was “made to make sense” through the weaving together of partial understanding(s). One of the main thrusts of this book is how a willingness to understand is a necessary (if insufficient) component in the project of communicative sociality, especially for natural sign in which grammar cannot be relied upon to ground understanding (and I see this also in your previous work on International Sign). Can you say more about the stakes of this idea?

Mara Green: Thank you for these generous and thoughtful questions! Yes, one of the main arguments of the book is that willingness to understand is necessary, particularly in cases of emergent language practices, because such practices by definition do not involve the robust, symmetrically shared grammatical resources offered by conventional language(s). I appreciate the opportunity to say a bit more about this and also to think across my work on natural sign in Nepal and on International Sign (IS).

Before I get to natural sign and International Sign language, I want to emphasize that one of the reasons conventional grammatical systems are so powerful is that they obviate much of the need for willingness – or at least, some of the need, in some circumstances, and for some people, to be a little bit, albeit imprecisely, Peircian about it. When I’m listening to someone speak English, or watching someone sign NSL, for some level of referential understanding, my willingness becomes backgrounded, and perhaps even unnecessary. I can even pay only partial attention. I’m also thinking about how I live in New York City, on a loud street, and the kinds of spoken communication I hear even when I’d rather not – that is to say, the materiality of different communicative media or modalities, such as speech and sign, also matter here. I think about these aspects – of conventionality and materiality – as more or less interpellative, depending on circumstances.

The capacity to background willingness also produces its own important effects within everyday sociality. This is why deaf NSL signers care so much about NSL, and the networks it mediates, creates, and is reproduced by. Certain forms of political and social life become possible when conventional language is available. On page 20, I write about how seductive conventional language can be; this property is related but not identical to the interpellative quality of conventional language. Together, I think these dimensions go a long way toward explaining why – as so many activists and researchers have shown – deaf signers value sign-centered spaces. Terra Edwards’ recent book Going Tactile explores the value of this kind of shared language in the context of DeafBlind signers.

At the same time, it has become so apparent to me, across many years and the different sites where I’ve been really privileged to engage in fieldwork, that conventional language isn’t necessarily necessary for communication that is referentially (along with socially, emotionally, and so on) meaningful. I would be fascinated to be proven wrong, but it seems that gesture, visual signing, and protactile languaging here have a real advantage over speech (by which I mean speech on its own, which is actually not how many, many people use speech, as gesture researchers have shown). Work by people like Adam Kendon, Charles Goodwin, Annelies Kusters, Terra Edwards, and many others shows how gestures, signs, and protactile resources articulate with what in the book I call the sociomaterial world. To make sense of how people materialize this convergence, I argue that signs are immanent in this world and can be brought forth through the movement of the body for the purpose of semiosis. So these modalities or channels offer opportunities for representation and reference, even when linguistic conventions are less abundant than in conventional language situations. For example, even if there’s not a conventional sign for something like marriage, you could point to where someone would wear a ring or necklace that marks being married.

To address my previous research: I think it’s helpful to mark two primary differences between International Sign and natural sign. First, in the situations where I have experienced IS, signers in their everyday lives are using at least one, and often many more than one, conventional language (signed, written, and/or spoken). In the situations where I have experienced natural sign, there are times when everyone involved also uses a conventional language – for example, when a hearing person who is fluent in Nepali and a deaf person who is fluent in NSL are communicating. But, as the book lays out, natural sign is the primary communicative mode for many deaf Nepalis (some of whom also use speech, to varying degrees). I think there’s a key difference between moving between conventional and emergent language and living primarily or entirely in the latter, and this is related not just to the communicative resources one has, but also the kinds of communicative socialities one inhabits. My argument is that for people who don’t have another horizon, the stakes are especially high.

The second important difference is distribution of willingness. Simply put, in the IS settings I’ve been in, most everyone is willing, and often super excited, to do the work of what, in the article you linked, I call linguistic commensuration – making meaning across language differences. In the natural sign settings I’ve been in, some people are invested, some people are not, and some people sometimes are. Perhaps it’s ironic that in the higher stakes situations, in a sense, there’s less guarantee of willingness, but maybe it’s not ironic, in that that’s exactly what produces these higher stakes, both in particular interactions and over time, as understandings, misunderstandings, and not-understandings accrue.

Timothy Loh: Some of the arguments you make in this book really go to the heart of linguistic anthropology. You urge anthropologists not to dismiss referentiality too quickly or to assume its presence, and to think about the relationship between semiotics and ethics, the line between which is blurred for natural sign users (p. 116). How do you hope your book will be taken up by linguistic anthropologists—and other scholars?

Mara Green: I remember attending a talk during graduate school – admittedly not a linguistic anthropology or even sociocultural anthropology event – where someone used a referentially rich and syntactically complex sentence to insist that signifier and signified had become detached. And I remember thinking, “But I just understood you!” I was very pleased to get to make this argument in print.

Now, one could argue that the referents of the words signifier and signified in that person’s talk and in my work are different, and maybe that’s the case. Regardless, I think it’s easy for people to take language for granted. And to be clear, I think people should have access to settings where they can take language for granted (as I write below) – but I also think that it’s important to call attention to this taken for grantedness and to its social, political, and theoretical consequences.

On the theoretical level, I hope that linguistic anthropologists, but also other scholars who are concerned with language, language use, and semiotics (and I’d venture to say that’s a vast majority of social science and humanities scholars), will ask themselves, “On what ground am I making claims about the relative non-centrality of reference?” I think that going beyond reference is exciting, important, and one of the great contributions of linguistic anthropology and allied fields. And it can be easy to presume that something is peripheral, rather than foundational (albeit not the focus of your argument), if it’s something you, and the people with whom you work, get to take for granted on an everyday and analytic basis.

In my everyday life, as in this written interview, I can take reference for granted (usually – I’ve been thinking more and more about how misunderstandings may sometimes rest on assumptions of shared reference that under scrutiny are revealed as not-so-fully-shared). But, many people I’ve worked with over the years can’t. In spending time with these interlocutors – trying to make plans, have a conversation, or ascertain a detail in natural sign, or, in the case of talking with NSL signers, attending to their stories about what their lives outside of NSL were and are like – and in writing the book (especially the transcriptions!), I have come to realize how important it is to recognize when something can be moved beyond precisely because it is so robustly present.

Even beyond linguistic anthropologists and other scholars, I hope that the book can be taken up by and of use to people, in Nepal and elsewhere, who are trying to wrest resources from states and other centers of power for the purposes of cultivating spaces where more and more people can take reference, language, and communicative sociality for granted. In case that isn’t clear: fund deaf schools and organizations and prioritize hiring deaf teachers, staff, and administration!

Timothy Loh: Your book tackles these large questions and/but is based on deep ethnographic fieldwork in Maunabudhuk and Bodhe. I was wondering to what extent it matters that the phenomenon you are studying is happening in Nepal? In other words, what is Nepalese about this story?

Mara Green: This is a great question, and one that is tricky to answer because it’s not a comparative project, but a few things come to mind. First, I want to mention how the generosity of people with whom I worked in Maunabudhuk, Bodhe, Kathmandu, and elsewhere feels very Nepali to me. People were generally willing to spend time with me, answer my awkward questions, try to understand my foreign accent, let me videotape them, etc. and they did this frequently and with good humor – and fed me to boot. So the kinds of access to settings that I had were enabled by particular, Nepali (if not exclusive to Nepali people) orientations toward hospitality and conversation.

The second way I’d answer this question is to think about communicative practice and habit. In the book, I cite Mike Morgan’s notion of “gesture prone” places, and I’ve had conversations with other friends, both deaf and hearing, about the kinds of responses that hearing people have when they realize someone is deaf, in, say, North America or South Asia. Obviously this is a generalization, but the consensus is that in the former, hearing nonsigners panic, or yell very loudly, or maybe try to find paper and pencil. In South Asia, very frequently, people are willing to use their hands. Further research would be needed to think across places and the different kinds of habits people produce and inherit. Is this South Asian pattern due to broader linguistic diversity, with (hearing) people being used to making meaning across differences in spoken languages? Is it because of higher overall percentages of deaf people within any given setting? Something else?

It’s also important to mention how this book is about a particular time in Nepal. Through the course of my fieldwork, I’ve met many deaf people who grew up before deaf schools were established – either in Nepal at all, or in their area – and thus didn’t grow up signing NSL. As I say in the book, I’m not predicting an end to natural sign as more and more deaf children grow up going to schools with other NSL signers, but I do think that natural sign will shift, as it becomes the primary communicative mode for fewer people.

Timothy Loh: I was really struck by the paradoxes and contradictions that you present in this book: that natural sign is “perfectly adequate” and enables communication “with a broader range of people than [Nepali Sign Language]” yet “[imposes] limits on communication” (p. 36); that it is “often easy and often difficult” (p. 82); and so on. These can be understood as language ideologies, though it seems you chose to background that framework in this book. You also do so much in this book: using graphics, tracking eye gaze, and so on. I’d love to hear more about the process of writing this book, especially in terms of thinking about the multiple modalities involved.

Mara Green: I’m frequently telling my students to pay attention to tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions, so I’m glad that I have followed my own advice.

You’re right that I background the framework of language ideologies, and that’s despite having had the opportunity to co-edit a volume on sign language ideologies with Annelies Kusters, Erin Moriarty, and Kristin Snoddon. One of the arguments we make in the introduction to the book – an argument that is unlikely to surprise readers of this blog – is that language ideologies isn’t a synonym for (other people’s) incorrect ideas, and that scholarly as well as local theories of language are ideological. Given that invocation, this next move may be surprising: I actually want to emphasize a distinction between claims I’m making about what other people say (for example, that natural sign is in some situations perfectly adequate but also limiting) and other kinds of claims (such as: that I have witnessed communication in natural sign that appears fluid as well as halting, that I’ve experienced this myself). This distinction is not because what other people say is ideology and what I say is fact, of course, but because I want to be clear that NSL signers’ claims about natural sign are ethnographic and theoretical as well as ideological, just as my own claims are (inevitably) ideological as well as ethnographic and theoretical.

More broadly, I found that thinking through questions of orientation and practice was a productive way into the entanglement of what people say about what they do and what they do, including the ways people contradict themselves, for example, by saying “I don’t understand” in speech but responding in sign, or the ways they make their own predictions/evaluations come true, for example, by saying “I don’t understand” in speech and looking away from a signer. Going back to the previous question about semiotics and ethics, trying to track people’s ideas about signing, their relationship with a specific person, the actual unfolding of a conversation across modalities, and the ways that these different threads reinforce, contradict, and complicate each other, helped me to recognize and articulate the blurriness of the semiotics-ethics line, whereas (at least for me) the concept of linguistic ideology might have made it seem very stark.

I will say that I never thought I’d be a person who did frame by frame analysis or tracked something like eye gaze. But that’s where the material brought me. Perhaps that is part of what you’re asking about, both in this and the following question. I think one of the great privileges – and contributions – of anthropology (and I’m thinking about Lynnette Arnold’s interview here on CaMP, which I was just reading, and Diego Arispe-Bazán’s question about ethnographic intimacy), is the way it compels us. The number of times I saw people’s eyes move away from a signer, or glaze over, was unignorable. I was lucky to have an extended example (analyzed in Chapter 4) where that was clearly captured on video, since often such conversational moves were fleeting and in situations where I wasn’t filming.

This brings us to your question about modalities. Even within the textuality of the book, there are multiple ways I tried to represent communicative practices: glossing a sign in English or Nepali, describing a sign’s handshapes and movements, offering a translation of spoken Nepali, with or without a transcription of it. From my earliest presentations of this work, I’ve found video – and for publications, freeze frames or sketches – to be really helpful for getting across both some of the details of interaction and some of the arguments I’m making about it. Whether for video or still images, there’s a question of selection – what exactly do I want to show? This was most apparent to me when working with artist Nanyi Jiang. It was such a fun and generative process to show her a freeze frame, or occasionally a photograph or a short video clip, and discuss what dimensions she should focus on in creating the line drawings that appear on the cover and in the book.

There is a risk with video in particular that people will think that what you’re arguing, what they’re seeing, or even signing itself as a linguistic modality, are self-evident. But the benefit, which for me has outweighed the risks, is that there’s at least some possibility of showing and not just telling (I’m thinking here again with Terra Edwards’ book). I hope that having images offers readers a kind of possibility for understanding that is different from what text alone can offer. And as I say in the introduction, specific ways of representing sign and speech will resonate differently with different readers.

I also want to mention that I’m not 100% happy with all of my choices. Using a slash mark between ALL-CAPS SIGN/italicized speech or using symbols like ### to mean “signs that I do not know how to gloss” leaves some elegance to be desired. And my use of transcripts and drawings both facilitates and creates barriers to access, in different ways for different readers, in ways I’m still thinking through – and here I’m grateful to be in conversation with friends and colleagues.
Susan Slyomovics on her book, Monuments Decolonized

February 10th, 2025

https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/monuments-decolonized

Sultan Doughan: There is so much material to mine and ask questions about in this wonderful book, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage, with so many beautiful and moving images. It is truly a monumental book! I am particularly intrigued by this last passage in the conclusion of the book:

“Algeria’s place in settler colonial theory by virtue of decolonization seems to offer closure in settler colonial studies because the country presents a self-contained, neatly bracketed evolution from its 1830 colonization to its 1962 decolonization. Since the Algerian Revolution first defined itself by anti-colonialism, the emergence of newer Algerian sensitivities attests to a transition: colonialism ceases to be the foundation of the state (even if negatively) and becomes one part of a complex patrimony to be used, repurposed, mobilized, valorized, and reclaimed. When viewed through the lens of a reproducible transcultural memory and shared heritage on both sides of the Mediterranean, the presence of Algerian memories about France’s places, beliefs, and ceremonial occasions, while saturated with painful violence and nostalgia, underscore how settler colonialism might end in the former colony. A post-settler passage into something else may be happening in Algeria, not in France.” (p. 199)

You trace in your book the actors that are “safeguarding the patrimony of French Algeria.” In most of your examples of Algerian monuments, we see how pedestals, plinths, stelae are reinterpreted, repurposed and rebuilt to replace former French war memorials and generals. It is certainly moving away from the French past and reclaiming history from an Algerian nation-state position. It could well be seen as a closure, as you yourself suggest in your last paragraph. To what effect do various actors safeguard the patrimony of French Algeria, or better how does the patrimony in fact safeguard colonial structures and unsettle notions of belonging and loyalty in the territorially demarcated nation-state, be it France or Algeria?

Susan Slyomovics: Ahmed Benyahia, the artist profiled in my last two book chapters (in addition, his painting is the book’s cover) was historically responsible for saving the most magnificent interwar colonial monument in Algeria. He convinced Constantine’s then mayor to keep the monument, and refuse the request of former European settlers of Constantine, who came to visit after Algerian independence and their relocation to France in 1962, with the sole purpose of taking the magnificent World War I monument with them to France. This was in fact the same protocol for the Oran war memorial described in chapter two, a rare case of legal removal in 1968 five years after Algerian independence. Benyahia’s argument was, and still is based on an expansive definition of provenance to determine the many ways that the Constantine war memorial is Algerian and should remain in Algeria: many war memorials and statues are made from Algerian stone because Algeria has extensive marble and stone quarries long exploited since Roman times; the artist who sculpted the giant Winged Victory figure on top of the war memorial was an Algerian Jew, Joseph Ebstein. His Winged Victory is a scaled-up copy of a delicate Roman statue found when the French troops “modernized” or “Haussmann-ized” Constantine, meaning they destroyed large swaths of the walled city after the French conquest to build their European city. The monument’s main section is a copy of the Roman arch of Timgad, some 100 miles away. The monument is incised with the names of Algerian soldiers who died fighting for France in two world wars. This included Benyahia’s own family members. Algeria was the only French colony with a mandatory conscription and military service beginning in 1913, just in time for World War I. And finally, Constantine’s war memorial was built with native Algerian labor. So, these definitions of provenance are both the conventional ones of art history, but also new ones linked to colonial violence – of a people, the land, the city, and their extracted materials. Provenance is more than reclamation; it is an assertion of ownership over a statue, and it comes with taking care of it in the place where it was originally sited.

Dan Hicks: I want to ask something about the place of Patrick Wolfe’s work and settler colonial studies in the study. In the introduction you discuss Wolfe’s famous line that “settler colonialism is a structure,”and then you write that“a statue is literally a structure meant to be looked at.” It would be great to hear more about how you apply settler colonial studies, and Wolfe’s work in particular, to the question of monuments and monumentality.

Susan Slyomovics: My influences are from Patrick Wolfe but more so Lorenzo Veracini, a colleague of Wolfe’s. Both came to UCLA, and I am lucky to know and learn from them since they write extensively about settler colonialism but with different emphases. In fact, Lorenzo and I organized a conference at UCLA in 2017 after Patrick’s death followed by our co-edited volume: Race, Place, Trace: Essays in Honour of Patrick Wolfe (London, Verso, 2022). Veracini writes about political sensibilities and the rhetorical traditions of settler-colonial expansion in his book, The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea (London, Verso, 2021) which has a section on the Pied-Noirs or former European settlers of Algeria. Although Algeria began as failed convict colonialism, the colony was a place to move French Republicans in 1848, the Communards, the Spanish Republicans expelled from France to Algeria in the 1940s, all movements that established a new geopolitical order elsewhere. Overseas displacement to Algeria transformed Europe’s poor (or the revolutionary) into farmers, landholders, and settlers. After Algerian independence in 1962, European settler colonial traditions continue into the global present after the settlers were largely “repatriated” to France. The memories of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) are re-enacted in France as the loss of empire and grafted onto World War I and II commemorations, as in the rare case of the legally removed Oran war memorial statue now in Lyon, France that became a locus for settler “nostalgeria.” Now nostalgeria (in French nostalgérie) is a compound word – nostalgia plus Algeria – and it has real everyday consequences. Nostalgeria by European settlers of Algeria now in France imagines colonial Algeria as a place where Muslims and Europeans got along, a brotherhood of races and religions mixing. In reality, they have reproduced the legal and spatial actuality of a colonial Algeria divided by race and religion in France and many support the politics of anti-immigrant, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic views.

Dan Hicks: What about the connections between fallism and restitution? It would be great to hear more about the points you make around the differences between the Sarr-Savoy Report on sub-Saharan African collections and the Stora Report on Algeria. How does the history of repatriation to France (which involves war memorials, statues and statues, and people too) relate to issues of monuments. And thinking about returns in the other direction, how do your arguments play out in debates about longstanding demands for the return of Algerian archives, reparations, apologies for atrocities, and Macron’s memory politics?

Susan Slyomovics: I thought about some of these issues as I wrote the book when I published two relevant articles: “Commissioning Memorial Reconciliation: The Stora Report and Algeria’s Ottoman Cannon in France,” Modern and Contemporary France, 2023; and “Repairing Colonial Symmetry: Algerian Archive Restitution as Reparation for Crimes of Colonialism?” In Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective, edited by Jacqueline Bhabha, Margareta Matache, and Caroline Elkins (2021).

Since the archive of French Algeria remains largely in French hands, there is no escaping historical linkages between France’s settler colonial project in Algeria and ongoing disputes about archival sovereignty, provenance, and digitization. Who physically possesses the actual archive therefore raises issues about the afterlives of settler colonialism in France, the metropole, and human rights definitions of reparation and restitution. These ongoing disputes related to the colonial archive highlight theoretical, affective, and historical arguments and also serve as a real and symbolic proxy for unresolved claims against the former French colonial state over crimes its agents perpetrated during its period of conquest and rule in Algeria. While historian Benjamin Stora calls this “memory wars” in his Stora Report, in contrast, Algeria’s leadership speaks of colonial crimes that demand acknowledgment, restitution, and reparation. Numerous documented cases of French destruction of archives both during the 1830 conquest and 1962 independence bookend the extreme violence of imperialism and colonialism between those dates. Alexis de Toqueville was in Algeria in the 1830s and describes the French army’s wholesale, deliberate destruction of the archival record such as Ottoman property records, taxation rolls, manuscripts, entire libraries, institutional mortmain deeds – in fact and in deed, a deliberate state policy of destruction, replacement or removal. In 1971, then President of Algeria Houari Boumedienne established Algeria’s National Archives and launched an early campaign to recuperate archives held in France perhaps spurred by the creation in 1966, in Aix-en-Provence, of France’s overseas archives with an estimated 60% holdings from Algeria. More recently Algeria has made archival demands as a form of restitution grounded in Article 11 of the 2008 UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights pointing to archives taken without their prior informed consent and in violation of their laws, traditions and customs. Until the 1980s when Mitterand came to power in France, there were some archival restitutions usually as diplomatic gifts during state visits. So, the gift was not the acknowledged legal transfer. Only in 2007, were Algerians given the supposed gift of maps of mines placed alongside both their borders during the war, which after independence not only killed 30,000 people but also made large swaths of border lands uninhabitable. In addition, there is little agreement on digitization versus the original between the two nations, and to this day there is incomplete knowledge about the French holdings of Algerian materials. The Stora Report, commissioned by President Macron, does not come anywhere near the scholarly value of the Sarr-Savoy Report, which unequivocally states that objects deemed spoils of war resulting from punitive imperial military expeditions be restituted. Quantification of colonial violence visited on exotic objects preoccupies the Sarr-Savoy Report as the authors discuss two key concepts: tabulating plunder, a kind of numerical visibility, and ways to determine provenance. The Stora Report does none of that, but deals in platitudes about reconciling memories, with little detail, enumeration, what’s held where, and merely calls for more binational commissions, which have not happened. The Stora Report does mention an important Algerian object transformed into a war memorial in France which has been a major point of contention between the two nations. Algiers was defended successfully for several hundred years by massive Ottoman cannons. The city’s harbor was called the well-protected, encircled by Ottoman cannons that staved off incursions from Spain, and other nations. After the French conquest of Algeria, the French melted down some Ottoman cannons, one became a beautiful statue of St. Augustine which still stands in Algeria, while Algerians keep demanding another Algiers cannon, which was shipped to the French naval academy in Brittany in 1830. Cannons defending Algiers are horizontal facing the enemy outward, but this one was turned vertically upright, with the ubiquitous Gallic rooster placed on top and made into a war memorial. The two countries don’t agree on definitions of repatriation and reparation. French law refers to returning European settlers, some one million at independence, as “repatriates” and has enacted several reparation programs for settler losses after they departed from the colony at independence which facilitated their integration into France after 1962. In these ways France did not compensate the colonized in Algeria but rather reinvigorated the settler in France through “repatriation” and “reparation.” And Algeria has never stopped demanding pre-colonial archives and artifacts.
Training Generative AI – What Do We Think?

February 6th, 2025
Miranda Sheild Johansson is an academic at UCL anthropology who has just published a book with Cambridge University Press and was asked to sign a new generative licensing agreement.

Christine Daouti is a copyright librarian at UCL and part of a working group of looking at copyright and AI.

Attribution: Created by ChatGPT. Prompt by Miranda Sheild Johansson: Create an image that illustrates the legal complexity around AI and copyright. DALL·E 2024-12-20 12.13.17 – A visually striking illustration depicting the legal complexities of artificial intelligence and copyright. The scene features a symbolic sc.webp

The researcher’s perspective

As educators we’ve been thinking a lot about how to deal with AI in teaching, but another part of this story is how our research outputs are used to train AI. Recently, publishers have been asking authors to sign Generative AI licensing agreements (see here for updates on which publishers are doing this https://sr.ithaka.org/our-work/generative-ai-licensing-agreement-tracker/). In theory, these agreements shore up copyright protection with regards AI, allow for royalties to be collected when material is used by AI, and pave the way for publishers to create their own AI tools. In reality, we know very little about the future relationship between our research outputs and AI products, but perhaps these licensing agreements provide a space for us as ‘content creators and trainers’ to have a say and influence the future use of AI in higher education and research? This short piece asks some initial questions that might be useful to think through when it comes to us and AI, it also includes provides key information and tips on how to talk to publishers about these agreements from Christine Daoutis, a copyright librarian UCL.

When I, Miranda, received one of these licensing agreements from my publishers, I wanted to stop and think before I signed. The AI industry is fast moving and the legal and regulatory landscape around it is ever evolving, desperately and often chaotically trying to keep pace with technological advances. In early 2024 the UK government planned to broker a code of best practice across different industries, but it was abandoned as the many stakeholders couldn’t reach a consensus on the basic principles of any agreement (see here for latest development of from UK IP Office Consultation on copyright and AI https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence). Legal cases are currently being fought which will determine the legal future of AI and copyright. For instance, the Authors Guild lawsuit against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement of their works of fiction will create precedence for the future. As the use of AI products proliferates it mostly feels like this is a ship we, as authors, do not captain and we simply have to buckle in for the ride. But the licensing agreements need our consent and therefore might offer us a little room to question the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of these agreements.

I got in touch with the copyright librarian at my institution, Christine Daouti, and found out that librarians have been doing a lot of work around this already, especially clarifying how current copyright law applies to AI usage. Christine is following live legal cases around copyright and AI, and creating, and updating guidance, for staff and students about legal use of AI and concerns to consider.

Talking to Christine about her findings and thoughts convinced me that we, as a community of researchers, writers, and curators of knowledge (like librarians), need to have a larger conversation about our role in training AI. What are our worst fears and what are our hopes, can we influence the content of these new licencing agreements? Going forward, the quality and impact of AI will depend on what content is legally accessible for its training. Making high quality and rigorous research available to AI democratises knowledge. However, concerns over of attribution, misattribution, infringement, bias, and error abound, as well as broader concerns over the ethical responsibilities of AI companies, working conditions for AI ‘trainers’, and the environmental impact of accelerating AI usage. And, as Christine has highlighted in her conversations with me and the department, how do we deal with the risks of models stifling creativity (by producing outputs based on averages rather than encouraging outliers, which would be much more creative)? The image above illustrates this, being immediately recognisable as an AI original, and lacking many things that an anthropologist might have included if given the same prompt – Create an image that illustrates the legal complexity around AI and copyright – for instance, humans at work.

As a first step, we should all be discussing this within departments and institutions. What does this, the licensing agreements and AI more broadly, mean for us, as authors, and what part can we play in these unfolding AI issues?

Christine has put together some clear and current guidance, which is helpful for this moment in time. We are building a small resources bank with recent relevant publications and websites all linked below. We hope this can be of use to all.

The copyright librarian’s perspective

This commentary draws from guidance on the UCL Library website, https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/generative-ai/copyright

The explosion of GenAI in late 2022 certainly added new perspectives to my copyright support role at UCL. Copyright is complex and fascinating enough when humans are involved; adding to this tools that can access and process a huge amount of information in record time, let alone generated works that may or may not be seen as the original creations of a human, and you have copyright conundrums to last you a lifetime.

As Miranda mentions above, our main focus has been the use of GenAI in teaching and learning and, to some extent, the use of AI in research. Using AI tools may or may not constitute copyright infringement; a question complicated by the fact that there is currently little transparency on what AI models are being trained on. Are the sources lawfully accessed and used, and what are the implications of this for AI developers but also users? Answers to this will be largely shaped by court cases (for example, the ongoing court cases (for example, Getty images vs Stability AI and the Authors’ Guild vs OpenAI) but it may be years before a precedent is established. Furthermore, what is decided in one jurisdiction (for example, that training an AI model in the US was ‘fair use’) might be different to a decision in other countries, where different laws apply.

Besides possible infringement and liabilities, there are broader concerns around accuracy, biases and lack of attribution (or misattribution) of the generated material. These points, and even broader concerns around the ethics and environmental impact of AI companies, are some of the issues being highlighted to students and staff in Higher Education. However, relatively less attention has been given to the impact of our own research being used to train AI.

Miranda contacted me a few months ago to discuss an agreement she was asked to consider signing with the publisher of her upcoming book. This was shortly after Taylor and Francis (Informa) Taylor and Francis (Informa) announced a deal with Microsoft allowing the use of their content for AI training, without informing or seeking the consent of their authors. While it could be argued that the copyright to publications included in the deal has been assigned to the publisher and therefore consent was not necessary, contractual interpretation suggests that if an agreement did not specify AI use, permission should be sought from the authors (see Kluwer copyright blog; also see the positions of the Authors’ Guild in the US and the Society of Authors in the UK. Authors being asked to give consent for their works to be used in AI training, receiving royalties and being attributed are among the requirements set out in their positions.

So, what should I advise an author to do when receiving such an agreement? More generally, what should we be considering when facing the prospect of our works being accessed, processed and possibly reused in new AI generated works?

The answer to this is not simple and the first thing that comes to mind is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. Commercial authors in the creative industries will have different interests, concerns and opinions to academic authors; within academia, too, publishing a textbook that may attract royalties will raise different questions and concerns to publishing a journal article with no remuneration. Authors in the humanities will almost certainly have different concerns to SMT authors, and authors of open access publications (intended to be accessed and reused under open licences) may react differently to the prospect of their works, already licensed for reuse, being used by AI.

Other important factors when thinking about AI include who, how, and for what purpose is using the materials in AI tools. We may think differently if a large commercial company is using materials to train its models for profit; differently if a research student is mining our research to look for patterns with the help of AI; and yet differently if a commercial research company draws from our publications to create solutions that might save lives. Overall, it is important to note that AI models being trained on peer-reviewed scholarly research is likely to reduce biases and increase the accuracy and reliability of the models. (For a more extensive discussion on this, please see the Knowledge Rights 21 Principles on Artificial Intelligence, Science and Research).

This diversity in interests, priorities, concerns and approaches must be acknowledged and captured in any consultations and decisions made by policy and law makers. The current UK government consultation on copyright and AI is focussing on introducing a broad copyright exception allowing the use of lawfully accessed materials for AI purposes unless the rights holder has opted out of the exception: in that case, a licence would be necessary. While this solution may be the preferred one for some stakeholders (the consultation proposals were developed with the creative industries in mind, not researchers), it will introduce barriers to accessing and reusing scholarly research with the help of AI.

But back to publisher agreements…Bearing in mind that an AI using your research may well be considered lawful anyway (depending on the jurisdiction) what should you do when asked to agree to your work being included in AI training datasets?

The decision is yours and it will greatly depend on many factors besides copyright. The points below are just some issues you will need to consider and discuss with your publisher.
- Accurate attribution. If parts of your publication is to be reproduced in GenAI outputs, how will you be attributed?
- The purpose and nature of the reuse. What is covered by current licensing agreements with AI providers? For example, your work could be used to improve the accuracy of the tools or to develop new tools. How would this be achieved?
- Are there any providers or uses that you have an objection to, for ethical or other reasons?
- Control over new uses in the future
- Royalties (in the case of books)
You should be able to ask your editor for more information before you make a decision.

Resources:

Gershon, I. (2023). Bullshit Genres: What to Watch for When Studying the New Actant ChatGPT and Its Siblings. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 47(3), 115–131. https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.137824

Tamer Nawar; Generative Artificial Intelligence and Authorship Gaps. American Philosophical Quarterly 1 October 2024; 61 (4): 355–367. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/21521123.61.4.05

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-humans-technology-business-factory.html

https://theconversation.com/an-academic-publisher-has-struck-an-ai-data-deal-with-microsoft-without-their-authors-knowledge-235203

https://sr.ithaka.org/our-work/generative-ai-licensing-agreement-tracker/

https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2024/12/18/report-on-a-roundtable-on-academic-publishing-and-genai-deals-genai-and-copyright-series-at-the-institute-of-brand-and-innovation-law/

https://www.gtlaw.com.au/insights/getty-images-vs-stability-ai

Large language models and copyright, what next?

https://cla.co.uk/ai-and-copyright/principles-for-copyright-and-generative-ai/

Artificial Intelligence

https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/generative-ai/copyright

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence
Steven Feld on his book, Acoustemology

February 3rd, 2025

https://www.stevenfeld.net/acoustemology-four-lectures

Marina Peterson: It was a real pleasure to read the four chapters of Acoustemology: Four Lectures, which span your career. I was struck by the ways in which your work has been an active presence in my life since I was an adolescent. I bring this up not so much for the autobiographical, but for what it suggests about the significance of your work over the years, the ways it has circulated, and how it is situated in particular moments of thought. I had a copy of the Bosavi rainforest cassette you made with Mickey Hart as a preteen, which I listened to on my boombox, along with local Austin bands and mainstream popular music of the day. I probably received it as a gift from a parent, but listening drew me in to the Kaluli soundworld of human and nonhuman sounds and gave me a sense of what anthropology could be. You also had a public presence in Austin at that time as part of a vocal protest of Freeport McMoRan’s human rights abuses in Irian Jaya and its ties with UT and hill country development; the recordings drew these interconnected worlds into my bedroom. The Bosavi box set traveled with me through college, a kind of soundtrack to becoming an anthropologist of music and sound. The string band music paired with more traditional songs and rainforest soundscapes served as an argument for approaching indigenous peoples as modern, at a time when National Geographic described Papuans as a window to the past. This was also the moment when globalization was becoming a subject of study, with discussion of “multiple modernities,” or as Appadurai put it “modernity at large.” Your Public Culture article on world music was read eagerly by those of us looking for ways of bringing sound into these discussions, and for having it taken seriously. What I learn from this (personal) history is the presence and significance of your work at various moments, and the ways in which it has long addressed crucial conceptual concerns through sound. This continues with your recent project on heat, a powerful and incisive contribution to an analysis of climate change, in conversation with Latour, Descola, Chakrabarty, and others. What I especially love about the cicada lecture is the way it focuses on heat as a condition felt across species, cicada sound an automatic response to rising temperatures as a common acoustic experience around the world, which I read as a trenchant theorization of the Anthropocene. Can you speak to the ways in which this work has been in conversation with wider discussions in anthropology at various moments, and what it has meant to bring music and sound into these conceptual fields?

Steven Feld: Thanks so much for your generosity, Marina. It is lovely to be around long enough to enjoy how thoughtfully you and your generation of researchers have absorbed and continue to creatively expand the scope of that earlier anthropology of sound work, finding takeaways of use from my rainforest recordings, environmental political activism, writings on musical/sonic modernities and world music industrialization, and listening to/in Anthropocene realities.

To your specific question I would say that the ongoing conversations most close to me over 50+ years are ones in anthropologies of senses, perception, memory, emotions, bodies, affects, personhood, place, environment, media and intermedia, communications, images (especially photographic and film), materiality, property, poetics, dialogism and voice, aesthetics and art, globalization, modernities, indigenous representation, political ecology.

In one way or another all of these conversations are fused into this new intermedial and open access “book” Acoustemology: Four Lectures. The four lectures summarize my life of listening to histories of listening, from Papua New Guinea rainforests to European towns to West African cities, from birds to bells to toads to car horns to cicadas, from voices to tools to musical instruments, from material to spiritual presences. With multiple montage techniques of juxtaposed images, clips, sounds, and texts I explore sounding and listening as critical to understanding multiple relationalities, within, across, and among species, materials, and spirit presences. The backgrounds and historical footnotes to these conversations are further revealed in the book’s two dialogic appendixes, one addressing the “Hearing Heat” lecture and the possibility to recompose listening in/to Anthro/po/-scenes, the other concerning the way these many conversations led to fifty years of coining new terms, like anthropology of sound in 1972, and, twenty years later, acoustemology.

Marina Peterson: Acoustemology is a profoundly important term. There is really no other term like it, to get at how people listen as an ethnographic question, or “sound as a way of knowing.” Though it requires some work to expand knowing into bodily, sensory practice (which you do in the Keywords in Sound entry). I relied on it in Atmospheric Noise and teach a class on Sonic Ethnography that asks students to move from their own listening to focus on how others listen, relying on acoustemology as the anchor for what it means to listen ethnographically. I can’t find another word to use that helps do this work. Are there other terms or phrases that for you come close, or that do some of the same work?

Steven Feld: I don’t know. Certainly sound studies is now a major academic industry, including (at least) seven thick readers/handbooks/companions, and there are numerous textbooks and treatises with many heuristic proposals about the sound lexicon. I’m sure there are many new and interesting terms that I don’t know but that people are using to aid their explorations of sound in various contexts, and in various disciplinary discourses.

Regarding the term acoustemology: the book’s second appendix is a Feldicon conversation reviewing twenty-five of my coinages from the last fifty years. It includes a partial genealogy of acoustemology (acoustic epistemology, sound as a way of knowing). Among things I like to acknowledge about the background to the term acoustemology are: many conversations with Keith Basso that led to our Senses of Place conference and book; many conversations and debates with Murray Schafer about the limitations of soundscape and the deeper ethnographic and conceptual significance of Edmund Carpenter’s idea of acoustic space; years of conversations with Don Ihde about his Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound; many conversations with philosopher Edward Casey about an anthro-philosophy of place and body memory beyond Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception; conversations with anthropologist Nancy Munn (and earlier with Don Tuzin, Roy Wagner, and Annette Weiner) about relational ontology in Papua New Guinea, particularly what people hear and know about the world through listening to the environmental presence of ambiences, species, materials, and spiritual entities.

Marina Peterson: Toward the beginning of the first lecture you quote your own field notes, in which you write “…I have a Nagra.” Hi-fidelity recording equipment is an important part of your work, allowing you to capture sounds without interference or extraneous noise and to edit multiple tracks in a way that distributes sound spatially in ways similar to the rainforest. We don’t hear you, or the microphone, or the mixing board. What kind of compositional strategy is it to treat recording technology as transparent, a way of capturing sounds of a place but not revealing the practice of recording? It seems that you use recorded sound to support (rather than disturb or critique) an ethnographic real (as opposed to something like musique concrète on the one hand or the OS Collective’s remix work on the other), and I wonder if you would describe an anthropology in sound as what George Marcus (1982) described as “ethnographic realism” – a “mode of writing that seeks to represent the reality of a whole world or form of life”?

Steven Feld: Regarding the use of professional field recording technologies and studio techniques through my career, I’d say this. Technologically unprofessional recordings and technologically unskilled recordists are part and parcel of the insulting colonial legacy of ethnomusicology. I have always tried to resist and stand as far away from that lazy coloniality as possible. When we launched Voices of the Rainforest, the CD presenting in one hour the myriad multi-species sound interactions of twenty-four hours of a day in the life of Bosavi, at Skywalker Sound on Earth Day in 1991, Mickey Hart stood up in front of an audience of media and music industry heavies and said this: “So why did we do this, and why I am I part of it? It’s because I heard these amazing rainforest recordings Steven made in the 1970s, and when I finally met him and offered my compliments on his technical skills, he looked me in the face and said ‘why should rainforest music be recorded and presented any less well than Grateful Dead music?’ That put me in my place and made perfectly clear what this is all about: respect.” What else is there to say?

A second question you pose is about the visibility or audibility of my presence, my microphone, and whether or not certain forms of transparency yield to ethnographic realism and decline the possibility to disturb, disrupt or critique. With regard to this, I think that Marcus’ “ethnographic realism” is a profoundly un/der-theorized sledgehammer. Any literary theorist can explain very quickly that there are multiple kinds of realism in any genre; and any serious sound engineer or sound artist can immediately do the same. Is realism in any anthropological genre any different? Bakhtin 101. Forms of critique and disruption, no less realisms, exhibit no kind of unity and never have in any known discourse genre. All genres exhibit internal contradictions; they change and morph across the unfolding terrain of narrativity. “Realism” is always as potentially emergent and disruptive as it is latent and taken-for granted.

So: I make many kinds of recordings. There are at least seven genres audible in the examples for Acoustemology: Four Lectures. In some of these recordings my breath and footsteps (not to mention editing fingerprints) are all over the place, because one genre of recording (closer to the radio documentary aesthetic) involves making a self, a recordist, audible and present in the sound story. In certain other recordings there are figure and ground shifts and modulations but the space that is created is multi-perspectival rather than relating to the single point source of the microphone and announcement of the presence of the person holding it (this is particularly so in my recordings about bells create time and space consciousness in European towns). Going in a very different direction, some of my recordings are more immersive, composed using strategies from the toolkit of musique concrète and electroacoustic compositional design (for example the recording of the Hiroshima peace bell and cicadas). In other recordings I violate many of the supposed rules of naturalist environmental sound art; for example recordings where I don’t roll off the very lowest rumbling frequencies but rather selectively transform and allow them to help create the ambience and vibratory presence (Rainforest Soundwalks). Is that disruption and critique, or is it realist transparency? Both? Neither?

I think the most important aspect of an anthropology of sound in sound is the possibility to articulate theoretical ideas differently through sound recording and editing. An example I give in the book shows an image of the Bosavi composer Ulahi Gonogo sitting on a rock in a creek. Next to the picture is a ProTools mix chart of how I mixed the song that she sang there. There is a stereo track of her voice. Then there are stereo tracks at two different heights in the forest beyond the creek bank behind her. Then there are tracks of the water to her left, her right, and in front of her. Then there are tracks from just behind where I stood in the creek when I recorded her. All of these additional tracks were recorded just after I recorded her song. So why would I add all of these levels of sonic height and depth to the simple two track stereo recording of her voice? Well, because it allows me to theorize a critical acoustemological question. Namely: why only record and present what a singer like Ulahi sings when it is equally possible to record and present everything that she hears and sings with, to and about while she is singing? Put differently: can an anthropology of sound in sound recording theorize Ulahi’s acoustemological aura? Can it help us hear and imagine that in each gesture of her voice she moves through the creek as a bird flies it, as a human walks or swims it, all the while flashing back and flashing forward through a poetic image stack? And with all of that intervention through recording, through dialogic auditing and editing in the field, and then through studio mixing, is the result a token of ethnographic realism? A token of disruption/critique? Both? Neither? Or do these terms just fail miserably to characterize the complexly mixed genre(s) of the recording: documentary sound art meets cognitive anthropology meets ec(h)o-poetics.

Marina Peterson: You mention Valeria Luiselli’s use of acoustemology in her novel Lost Children Archive. I’m wondering if her discussion of “echoes” also resonates with how you’re using history. In her book, the main characters are making field recordings, with one trying to capture echoes of an indigenous past in a place. At one point the narrator explains what she understands her partner to be doing, “I think his plan is to record the sounds that now, in the present, travel through some of the same spaces where Geronimo and other Apaches, in the past, once moved, walked, spoke, sang. He’s somehow trying to capture their current absence, by sampling any echoes that still reverberate of them.” Her notion of echoes is different than histories (of listening) as learned, but I found it useful for thinking about how field recordings can move out of a realist mode of capture. Luiselli’s discussion of echoes also seems related to your discussion of “sound recording as a technology of memory, of capturing, holding, and slowing, of luxuriating in time, in the immediate and long past.” How do you understand the temporal capacities of sound recording in relation to place, or lived acoustemologies?

Steven Feld: I had the pleasure to discuss some of this with Valeria, whose book I find most remarkable for its acoustemological writings of voice, and its evocations of vocalic affect in the interactions of the parents and children in the car during the road trip. Yes, I like very much the playful incisiveness of her echoes. I found that her idea connected deeply with some of the ways I explored ec(h)o-poetics in Bosavi, that is, place and voice as co-resonant and co-resonators, finding the tension and play between the eco- and its echo. Valeria was able to connect these kinds of things to ways of writing memory and duration, and she also elaborates this kind of echoic exploration in the juxtaposition of the polaroid images and texts in the final part of the book, her scrapbook composition very much like the ec(h)o-poetics of a Bosavi song map. It was an honor to be both a real and a fictional presence in her novel, but I’m most deeply moved by her reflection on acoustemology, as well as her ability to read into the depth of the Bosavi world of poetic sound art.

Marina Peterson: What does listening as a practice mean to you? Is it primarily auditory, or does it necessarily include felt sound or vibration, wind, temperature, and humidity, vision and touch? The visual is also important in your work, but perhaps more in relation to the compositional. (You seem to treat the visual differently than sound, manipulating images to represent Kaluli mythologies and aesthetics for instance, while audio recordings immerse an audience in the sensory experience of a place.) Your most recent work is on heat, with the sounding bodies of cicadas an acoustic register of rising temperatures, which are of course also felt by those listening. You reject sound studies for its reification of sound, but there has been a lot of generative work in the field that argues for modes of listening beyond the ear, relationships between the senses, the potential of listening to images, and so on. Do you find this relevant for your work?

Steven Feld: Of course I do. Perception is the relationality of body to place, as Merleau-Ponty explained. Obviously listening is an embodied machine for emplacement, not simply a more limited matter of the excitation of auditory pathways. And sound is a fully capacious way of knowing because it is spectral, like light and heat, like smell and touch. Sensory modalities are always to some extent intersensory; one sense echoing into another, creating multiple registrations of what we call feeling. So listening as a practice for me is a full way of being a sensing, absorbing, reflecting body in the world, a way of lighting up, heating up, apprehending, witnessing, participating, in short, feeling/being relational. Sound is an excitation, but more a sensory invitation to something larger, something that penetrates the body even more deeply. I’m not a philosopher, but if I was the book that I would have wished to write about sound is the one that was written by Jean-Luc Nancy, titled Listening (the original French title was A l’écoute). I cite it multiply in the book; it fleshes out these little bits of answers to your question.

Marina Peterson: The book is a true multimodal publication, at a moment when there is increasing interest in the extra-textual and in alternative modes of publishing. What advice do you have to anthropologists invested in experimenting with form and publishing venues?

SF: My advice is: Resist the plantation system of university press publishing in any and every way you can. Resist the imperious academic journal corporatization of knowledge and the ownership paywall greed machine of the colonizing broligarchies (Wiley, Routledge, Taylor and Francis, Cambridge UP) in any and every way you can. Join a collective, create collaborations, learn the pleasures of risk, and learn how to use the available technologies to publish and control and share your work. DIY open access. “Give it Up, Turnit a Loose!” (James Brown).
David Divita on his book, Untold Stories

January 27th, 2025

https://utorontopress.com/9781487554279/untold-stories/?srsltid=AfmBOoq615DQfP5E2-AcCtkGe0xFZKGL5LbK2Oe7WywXSdqOaxZZsAeD

Cécile Evers: In the beginning of Untold Stories, you recount an anecdote about a meeting you had with Amalia, an elderly Spanish woman living in Paris, and you insightfully spell out for us how her exclamation of “I could write a book” links her experience of Spain’s authoritarian past, with the present of your meeting, to a speculative future in which she writes a book. We read in the introduction of your own path into writing this book. Could you say something about this?

David Divita: Of course! First of all, the book features a community of aging Spaniards who gather regularly at a senior center on the outskirts of Paris. These people participated in a wave of labor migration to northern Europe in the 1960s, when the Franco regime opened Spain’s borders as part of its attempt to modernize the country. In many conversations that I had with them, they would reflect on their past experiences – of Spain under dictatorship, of migration to France, of Paris in the 1960s and 70s. And on occasion they would interrupt their storytelling, as Amalia did one afternoon over sherry in her apartment, to say, “I could write a book!” It’s an expression I think most of us have heard before. Coming from individuals in later life, it signals awareness of the complexity of their life stories, of how these stories have been shaped by historical circumstances and thus merit documentation. But there’s a subtle paradox embedded in this exclamation. Most of the Spaniards I encountered in my fieldwork could not literally write a book. They’d spent only a few years in an anemic education system overseen by the Catholic church during the early years of the dictatorship, where they acquired little more than basic literacy skills. While writing Untold Stories, I came to imagine it in part as a material proxy for their speculative book.

Cécile: I wonder if you could tell us about where you have taken this research since the book’s publication? I’m curious, of course, about the new directions this research is taking, but also in a way about what Goffman would have seen as the production format of your book and its reception. I see you as animating these Spaniards’ experiences and stories in your book, a poignant fact because, as you write, they were socialized to silence their recollections of the Franco era. How does your book’s reception invite new interlocutors to the table and potentially create new speech chains in which these historical themes are being discussed?

David: Back in May I gave a talk about the book at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid alongside an anthropologist, Carolina Espinoza, who has done extensive research on Chilean migrants in France – many of whom fled political circumstances similar to those experienced by my Spanish interlocutors in Paris. This was for an audience of non-academics, many of whom happened to be around the same age as the Spaniards I first encountered in the field in 2008. In other words, they had come of age during the 1960s, after the regime had become intensely focused on modernization. For that reason, they had not been socialized in the same way to keep silent about painful aspects of Spain’s past, even though they could immediately recognize the norms around disclosure and omission that continue to govern communicative activity among their forebears today. One of the audience members said she found it surprising that even among those who emigrated and never returned permanently to Spain, the communicative value of silence remained imperative. Exactly! That shows how deeply this value had been inculcated, spreading across geographical space and enduring over time. Even among those who fled the dictatorship decades earlier, their acts of reminiscence in later life were shaped by it.

There were also some younger members of the audience in their twenties or thirties for whom the narrative of migration in Untold Stories echoes aspects of their family histories. They, too, have been affected by the legacy of silence among their grandparents, deprived of the knowledge and affective pull that firsthand accounts of the past often convey. The book, I hope, can accomplish some of that work for Spaniards born during and after the Transition – and indeed individuals elsewhere who are interested in understanding how the historical conditions in which people come of age shape the communicative practices that they carry across the life course. Partly to that end, Untold Stories is now being translated into Spanish and will come out early next year from Postmetropolis, a publisher in Madrid that has an extensive series of monographs focusing on 20^th-century history and politics. I’m excited by the possibility of the book reaching a Spanish audience in this way.

Cécile: Your book sheds new light on how people in later age experience transnational aging, though in the case of El Centro members, in ways additionally inflected by particular circumstances— “poverty, dictatorship, labour, migration” (p. 29). Can you say more about how El Centro members’ experience of aging in diaspora, colored by such circumstances, affected their language and semiotic practices?

David: I noticed early on that people at the Centro circulated texts of various kinds – poems, compositions, plays, and songs – that they had written themselves or copied from other sources. Because many of these texts came from or were about the time before migration, they seemed to link the Spaniards to a shared past while also facilitating a sense of belonging in the present. Ways of talking about these texts also revealed potent ideas about “good” language and moral character – ideologies that were particularly salient in a weekly Spanish literacy class that I attended during fieldwork. Analyzing that classroom data, alongside conversational interactions and life-story interviews, I came to understand ideologies about language – in particular, the value of rudimentary literacy practices and the cultural capital that they conferred – as another kind of legacy of the dictatorship. Among the Centro’s members, the acquisition of literacy skills seemed to fill a sense of lack leftover from a childhood conditioned by an authoritarian regime. These skills also legitimated a way of remembering, as the seniors could use them to produce written artifacts about the past that could then be circulated in the future. Moreover, there were affective dimensions to the pursuit of literacy skills – notably, shame and pride – that the class’s participants recruited into ideological projects, such as processes of social differentiation. These processes helped the participants understand themselves in relation to one another within the class, as well as to other communities of Spaniards, such as those who stayed in Spain, or to generational groups, such as their children or grandchildren.

Cécile: Staying with the topic of age, what do you see as the future of research at the intersection of age and language, or of your own research in that vein? Do you think that Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope holds particular theoretical weight for ethnographers wishing to better understand aging communities?

David: I think age is a dimension of identity that often gets overlooked. Maybe particular mobilizations of the chronotope – ones that spotlight temporality? – can help bring this dimension to light. The concept has been used in fruitful ways to analyze semiotic activity in situations of migration and diaspora. In the book, I draw on that scholarship while attempting to incorporate the particularities of later life. For older individuals, their retrospective gaze spans a wider swath of temporal and spatial coordinates. Their practices of remembering reflect a sense of being in relation to time and to the ongoing project of aging with which they reckon in the present. My interlocutors seemed to draw from a shared repertoire of chronotopes among Spaniards – such as the pueblo – as a means of assimilating both their experience of migration and the social position that they occupy as seniors. So yes, I think the notion of chronotope is quite useful for making sense of the semiotic practices of aging communities, and for making sense of the experience of aging in general.

I remain interested in this experience and the semiotic practices through which we navigate it. Recently I’ve turned my attention away from contemporary Spain and toward gay men in midlife. There are different aspects of my research on Spanish labor migrants that will animate this new project in subtle ways. Broadly, I’m curious about how the social and political conditions in which we come of age inform the communicative values and practices that shape the life course. What are the discursive effects of living in time, of living through a particular time? For this group of people with whom the project begins, I’m interested in the experience of coming of age sexually in the shadow of AIDS, specifically among those born in the 1970s, whose lives may not have been directly affected by the epidemic (meaning that their immediate communities were not devastated by the virus), but whose sexual identities were indelibly shaped by ideas about safeness, risk, and mortality. How might this experience inform the networks of kinship forged by those in midlife who lack a clear model for doing so? Much of the literature I’ve read thus far from psychology, public health, and popular cultural criticism tends to approach the experience of queerness in generational terms. This is also something that I intend to draw from my work on Spaniards and contemporary debates about historical reckoning. How are ideas about generations circulated, and what is their effect? What does the notion of a generation make visible? What does it obscure?

Cécile: Throughout the book, and especially in Chapter 4, you open a space to honor the “personal-biographical” mode of knowing the past, which El Centro members embody, in contrast to the “scholarly-historical” (91) mode of documenting the past. I know you teach about Spanish film and have also done research on the Law of Democratic Memory (2022) as well as on debates over how to resignify Franco’s memorial at the Valley of the Fallen. Do you find that your work to disseminate and elevate the experiences of people who lived through the Franco era resonates elsewhere, such as in current initiatives by the Spanish State or in forms of cultural production?

David: In the book I explore how individuals in later life navigate settings of epistemological tension in which their primary mode of knowing – and by that I mean the personal-biographical – is often delegitimized, undervalued, or somehow thrown into question by individuals or institutions that embody scholarly-historical knowledge. The population of Spaniards who can speak in this way about the dictatorship is waning fast, and there does indeed seem to be a sense of urgency among some government bodies and artists to document their experience, as I aim to do in the book. I’m thinking specifically about recent efforts to “re-signify” the Valley of Cuelgamuros (formerly known as the Valley of the Fallen), which you mention – the monumental complex that Franco began building outside of Madrid after the war. The site contains a basilica, a monastery, and vast crypts that contain the remains of people who died during the conflict and afterward – many of whom were never identified. Franco himself was interred behind the main altar there until his body was exhumed in 2019 after a lot of political fanfare. So how do you alter the meaning of a site of totalitarian grandeur – one that is still often recognized as a celebration of Franco and his regime, even though his body is no longer there? Some of the most compelling responses to this question have suggested returning to the monument “some memory of its own genesis,” as James Young (1993) wrote about Holocaust memorials in Europe (p. 14) – in part through the stories of those who helped build it through forced labor, as well as those who have recently solicited the state to find and identify the remains of forebears who were interred there. Their narratives illustrate the abiding emotional resonance of historical matters perhaps assumed by some to have been resolved or neutralized, and thus the affective power of personal-biographical modes of knowing.

As for cultural production, a recent example is Parallel Mothers, a film by Pedro Almodóvar that was released in 2021. (I’m currently teaching a seminar on Almodóvar, which is probably why he comes to mind.) Almodóvar came of age in the 1960s, and he has been making films since the Transition. Parallel Mothers is the first film (out of 23!) in which he engages explicitly with the issue of historical memory. The plot is set in motion when the protagonist asks for help from a forensic anthropologist to excavate the mass grave in her hometown where her great-grandfather and other family members were buried. Storylines then unfold in melodramatic directions (as we might expect from Almodóvar), but in the end the film goes to the pueblo and resolves the protagonist’s initial question about exhumation, representing the arduous labor of such sites and the emotional effect they can have on individuals whose families have been marked by them – not unlike recent reports on the Valley of Cuelgamuros.

Untold Stories has thus come out at a moment when state actors and artists (among other entities) discuss far more explicitly than before the legacies of the dictatorship. I see the book as an artifact that can perhaps illuminate some of these legacies as they manifest discursively. I’ve tried to do that by documenting the lives of Spaniards who experienced firsthand the historical events and processes that are often evoked in current debates about the past and its meaning in the present.

Work cited

Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Erika Alpert on her book, The Relationship People

January 20th, 2025

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498594219/The-Relationship-People-Mediating-Love-and-Marriage-in-Twenty-First-Century-Japan

Robert Marshall: How did you decide to study Japanese matchmakers? What is the origin story of this research project?

Erika Alpert: For many understandable reasons, most studies of gender—and by extension, gender and language—have historically focused on groups left out of most scholarship because they didn’t represent a supposedly normal human experience. This group includes basically everyone who isn’t a cisgender man: women, trans people, nonbinary people, and gender-nonconforming people, with most studies focused on women’s language. This is well-needed reparative work, but I think this focus on marginalized experiences also reifies the idea that gender is something that women (and other gender minorities) have, something irrelevant to men, who remain the unmarked category.

So my own goal, taking inspiration from scholars like Cindi SturtzSreetharan and Scott Kiesling, was to contribute to studies of putatively normal gender and sexuality. I think we all benefit from reminders that heterosexual, monogamous marriage constructed along more or less normative gendered lines is as artificial (that is, based on human art and artifice), invented, and specific to its historical moment as any other social institution. I also think that these kinds of studies do good work by showing how normative categories that seem monolithic are actually nuanced, complicated, and manifest differently in different situations too. (Here I’m thinking particularly of SturtzSreetharan’s work on gentlemanly masculinity in Japan.)

There were some twists and turns along the way to studying matchmakers specifically , but I think matchmakers are uniquely suited to help us understand the social construction of normative marriage, because helping put together normative marriages is literally the job description. This is true in Japan, and doubtless even more true elsewhere, where matchmaking is a more widespread phenomenon. And, from a purely practical perspective, studying the work and worldviews of matchmakers provides a fairly nonintrusive site for looking at these issues. I initially wanted to study romance, because I thought this would be a situation where gender differences would be really foregrounded, perhaps eroticized, hyper-salient, but also couldn’t think of how I’d actually observe that.

But perhaps most truthfully and most importantly, I got very lucky and stumbled into a group of chatty and welcoming people. An adjective that I’ve often used to describe Japanese matchmakers is evangelical, and I mean that very literally having good news that they want to tell you about. Matchmakers want to share their beliefs that marriage is good for people, that it helps them live more stable, supported, and therefore happy lives, and that anyone can get married with the right approach and mindset. It’s a social job that’s all about explaining what they do to clients, and why it’s great and they should try it.

Robert Marshall: Why do you think the standard model of family and the gender roles played out in Japanese family life are so deeply embedded and hard to dislodge in Japan?

Erika Alpert: I don’t know that these ideas are harder to dislodge in Japan than elsewhere, to start, and I’d be reluctant to make that claim. For example, at this point, Japan has much better labor protections for mothers, at least in law, than the US does (like paid childcare leave for the first year of a child’s life). But I do think that the social trajectory of trying to dislodge them, for a variety of cultural reasons, has taken a very different path in Japan than elsewhere.

For example, it’s tempting to talk about the way norms of motherhood seem particularly entrenched in Japan. We can point at Japan’s low rates of extramarital childbearing, the high numbers of women who quit work in anticipation of childbearing, and the effects of maternity on women’s job prospects and career trajectories as concrete evidence of that. That’s very real. It’s harder to have kids in Japan without rearranging the rest of your life into an appropriate maternal situation. But I also think there’s a very real tendency to portray Japan (and other Asian countries with similar issues, like South Korea) as uniquely traditional in contradistinction to Western countries, or perhaps worse, as uniquely misogynist. I tend to think that this is not the case, but rather, that patriarchy comes in a Skittles rainbow of different flavors everywhere that are not necessarily more or less. So even as I want to highlight that norms of motherhood are particularly weighted in Japan in ways that absolutely influence career choices and family formation of all kinds, and that also feel terribly oppressive to people of all genders, I also think it’s useful to keep in mind things like research about women’s employment in North America and Europe duríng COVID-19 lockdowns. Pandemic unemployment has uniquely affected mothers, who left the workforce much more frequently than fathers, because women often have more precarious jobs or lower-earning jobs that are easier to sacrifice, and women were expected to step into the gap left by closed schools and childcare facilities.

So, having said all that, with all due caution, I think we can say that women in Japan are profoundly affected by ideals of motherhood in particular, because childbearing and parenting outside of the heterosexual nuclear family model are so rarely undertaken and so poorly supported by Japanese society in both social ways (stigma) and institutional ways. As an example of the latter, Japanese bureaucratic norms that date back fully 1500 years embed individual legal existence in the family registry (koseki) system that makes children’s legitimacy readily socially and legally visible to others by means of whether they’re in their mother’s or father’s registries, rather than using documents like birth certificates that identify parents with reference to the child. In the context of North America and Western Europe, the response to illegitimacy has largely been to fight the stigma. In northeast Asia, I think it’s much more normative to simply avoid marriage and childbearing entirely, so that no one faces the stigma or burden of trying to do things differently. Choosing not to have children is a bit scandalous and incomprehensible in the US context (although I think this is changing), but sort of receives a sensible nod in the Japanese one. Of course one simply opts out of the whole affair if one can’t commit wholeheartedly to the roles of mother and wife (consider also the 4B movement in South Korea).

Leonard Schoppa has noted that Japanese women’s exit from traditional family formation in some ways exacerbates the problem of rigid gender roles because opting out solves these issues on an individual level, but prevents women from organizing collectively for better conditions for mothers, as they have done elsewhere. This reminds me of Erving Goffman’s discussion of “the arrangement between the sexes.” According to Goffman, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and racial minorities tend to be segregated into their own communities and can build solidarity and organize movements. By contrast, women are kept apart from each other by the structure of nuclear family households, and convinced to align their interests with their families instead of their fellow women or other gender minorities. Women are thus uniquely hampered in their attempts to collectively agitate for a different arrangement. So women who have opted for motherhood in Japan have often gone all-in (although working mothers of young children are on the rise). The women who are unprepared to do that have fully opted out. In many other contexts (I’m most familiar with the US and with Kazakhstan, apart from Japan), discussions of family problems or boosting birth rates focus on convincing people to have more children, to have more legally/religiously solemnized marriages instead of casual cohabitation, or to divorce with less frequency or haste. But rates of all of these phenomena are lower in Japan, and rates of singleness are higher—I think this also, over time, has produced this tremendous hurdle to jump, of convincing people to participate in the whole edifice of partnership and procreation in the first place, rather than to do it more or less or differently.

This answer has turned out to be tremendously long, but regretfully, I don’t know a shorter way to say these things! And I want to end by returning to the family registry system I mentioned above. This system has been in place roughly from the time of the Taika reforms circa 645 CE, when documenting families as patriarchal households was imported from China (along with a host of other bureaucratic and governmental changes). It was invested and reinvested with the full might of modern bureaucracy as Japan’s legal system was reformed first in the late 1800s, and again after WWII. Activists of all stripes have pointed to its many problems over the years, including the way it forbids married couples from bearing different surnames, a prohibition that has been upheld by Japanese courts both repeatedly and recently. It discriminates against international marriages, which have to be handled differently because those without Japanese citizenship have no family registries, and marriage is legally a process of moving one spouse into the other’s registry. Ironically, marrying a foreigner is the one way for women to retain their birth names after marriage, which I only found out from a friend’s announcement about her own marriage and name! And because of how marriage is handled by the family registries, as I noted earlier, the marital status of a child’s parents becomes completely transparent in a way that is not true of other record-keeping systems which might require, at a minimum, some cross-referencing of documents to facilitate discrimination. And yet, because it would require not just a legal overhaul, but a massive overhaul to any number of bureaucratic processes, new paperwork for everyone, and on and on, getting rid of the family registry system is more or less unthinkable (although activists and lawyers are, of course, thinking about it). But I would be remiss if I didn’t note that some of the reasons for the persistence of these problems is rooted not just in ideas about gender but in tremendously old ideas about what creates legal and social personhood, and how that personhood ought to be evidenced to others for any number of mundane purposes.

Robert Marshall: What do you think Japanese women and men hope to gain or accomplish or enjoy through marriage? Is it just that marriage promises to provide 1.5 children per couple? What is not available to them in some other way? Why are they are willing to turn to professional services to help them in this area?

Erika Alpert: Japan is an interesting case study for matchmaking as a more general practice, because first of all, brokered marriages only seem to have been widely popular throughout all social classes in Japan for a brief historical moment from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentienth, and then subsequently they fade away rather dramatically. At the same time, using a matchmaker to find a spouse lingers on as an option that’s available to anyone. This is in sharp contrast to, say, South Asia, where matchmaking has long been a mass practice that continues to be vibrant and meaningful in the present (although certainly not static or unchanging). It also stands in contrast to the individualist West (such as it is), where matchmaking occasionally occurs informally in ways that we understand to be minimally officious like being set up on a blind date), or is the suspiciously-regarded province of ethnic minorities. (I’m pretty sure I first learned about matchmaking from Fiddler on the Roof, and the Orthodox Jewish shidduch still thrives.) All of this is to say that we can’t talk about matchmaking in Japan without stressing on the one hand that is is very much a minority practice, but that it also has the fine patina of tradition attached. Only about 5-6% of all marriages in the present day involve some form of “matchmaking,” although that percentage actually increased quite a bit during COVID lockdowns. The Japanese word for this is omiai, referring to a formal introduction of two potential spouses from which marriage discussions then spin out.

Why do people engage in it? Well, I think my previous answer is partly relevant here. It’s incredibly difficult to have children while unmarried in Japan. It’s not so much that marriage promises children as that it’s the required first step for people who want to have them. But above and beyond this, Japanese matchmakers stress the social insurance provided by marriage when delivering the good news. In a way, it’s classic alliance theory. When you get married, you acquire people committed to taking care of you, even as you promise to take care of them—not just your spouse. You gain a network of expanded kin ties to sustain you through the vicissitudes of life. And for those who do have children, they also (in theory) gain the support of those children through their old age. In the classic words of The Legend of Zelda, it’s dangerous to go alone—take this (a spouse).

Of course, simply wanting a partner for companionship and social insurance doesn’t necessarily mean that someone will turn to matchmaking, but the advantage of matchmaking is that it’s a clearly defined process with clear aims. Japanese matchmakers like to talk about the ambiguity and uncertainty of dating, where there’s often not a clear trajectory to even good relationships. They especially highlight the vagaries meeting partners online, where app users have absolutely no idea, while browsing profiles, whether the other people are looking for the same thing or, in fact, if they are remotely who they purport to be. The pricing and structure of professional matchmaking is designed to discourage the unserious, because the fees can be quite high (hundreds of thousands of yen in a single payment for an engagement). The experienced human mediation of a matchmaker (as opposed to that of a friend or an app) is also meant to discern and guarantee the emotional, financial, social and other quality of potential matches. As I discuss in the book, I do think matchmaking is converging with other forms of mediated partner-searching, and that’s only to be expected as a normal change. Matchmaking in India has gone online too. But some of my interviewees on the client side of things absolutely felt that they met more serious partners via marriage bureaus as opposed to dating apps. Matchmakers, of course, insist on this distinction as an important marketing point.

Robert Marshall: You write that Japan has a long-standing birth and marriage rate crisis. Do you see any way out of it, or will Japan’s population gradually dwindle to zero? The conventional view, that the refusal of people to take up expected gender roles is responsible for the national crisis of decreasing population, lays public blame on individuals. Do you see any alternative to this view?

Erika Alpert: So let me start with the second part of the question. This is a classic critical theoretical point and paradox, isn’t it? In order to solve these problems, we have to look at structures, not people, although it is people and their individual decisions who in many ways act to recreate and reify the structures that constrain them. In any given social context, you have people making what they believe to be sensible decisions for them, given who they are, what they personally want, and what seems socially and materially possible for them. So in Japan, as I discussed, people who don’t think they can live up to the demands of parenthood might choose not to have children, and they might also choose to remain single so that there will be less pressure on them. When women get pregnant in Japan, many of them will leave their jobs, in part because that’s what’s expected of them, but also because Japanese society is in large part structured around the idea that mothers will be at home to provide childcare, and so other institutions around them, even ones that provide childcare, like preschools and kindergartens, become tremendously inconvenient without a caregiver at home to pick them up after a partial day of school. But then, of course, these sensible choices on an individual level tend to reify the profoundly imperfect realities that brought about those choices in the first place. As was true for US women during COVID lockdowns, so too women in Japan often quit their jobs because they make less money and so their jobs are more easily sacrificed for the benefit of the household. Then employers continue to justify sexist wages on the grounds that women are unreliable employees. Then women quit their jobs because they’re paid less, and the vicious cycle continues. I don’t think that we can or should blame any individual person for trying to make the best choices for them to survive. What we have to do is change the structures that lead to those choices in the first place, because no one person can do it alone.

We know that people will make different choices about family formation when we make changes to the incentive structures of various institutions. In the 2000s, a legal change made divorced women eligible to receive part of their (ex-)husband’s pensions, and for this among other reasons, divorce rates went up. Women had clearly been staying in unhappy or unsatisfying relationships because they had not worked much outside their homes, and so didn’t have pensions of their own. When they didn’t need the money any more, because they were recognized as having contributed invisibly to their husbands’ pensions, many felt much more free to divorce. I don’t want to say that this is necessarily a good or a bad change, but rather, clear evidence that structural changes work.

Knowing this, we can ask other questions about potential structural changes. For example, what might it look like if paid parental leave was not just made available but mandated for people of all genders? We know that taking parental leave tarnishes the image of employees who become mothers, in ways that affect how HR think of these employees and their commitments going forward. But sociologist Mary Brinton, in a talk, said that Japanese women she talked with about these issues deeply wished for mandated parental leave because that might be the only way men would ever take it. And if everyone had this time off, new mothers wouldn’t be notable for taking parental leave. So how might this reconfigure childcare arrangements? Or work-life balance for new parents? Or the career consequences of taking parental leave? One question that I ask in my book is very basic: what if wages were raised? What if paying for childcare or supporting children wasn’t a worry, because people knew they’d have enough money? What if men weren’t so concerned about the necessity of demonstrating their masculinity via their abilities to support a family financially, because they simply would have enough money? What if women weren’t worried about emasculating husbands by making more, because everyone would be making more, and spousal dependence on each other for income would be less pronounced?

Mainly, I think there are many things that can be done to raise birthrates, to make it easier to be a mother and other things also, or to be an engaged father. The urge for dramatic storytelling perhaps encourages journalists, social scientists, and politicians alike to paint a picture of the annihilation of human life and Japanese culture. I also don’t think it’s likely to happen—not in Japan, and not in any other country facing these demographic issues (which is basically all of them, to greater or lesser degrees). If nothing else, at some point the incentives in favor of liberalizing immigration law are going to outweigh the fears. While Japan has been painting a very quaint and isolated picture of itself for the last however-many decades, Japan has also, in its history, believed that Japanese culture and language should and could be learned by ethnic outsiders. Of course, the last time this happened, it was because Japan was engaging in an active imperial project throughout the Pacific, which no one should try to repeat. But there’s no reason to think that this belief couldn’t take root again under less violent circumstances, in the process of welcoming immigrants. The continuity of Japan does not depend on specific people reproducing that culture by teaching it to their biological children.

Robert Marshall: Goldstein-Godni has an article in Current Anthropology that just came out about a still admittedly marginal movement of men who call themselves sengyō shufu, but change the character fu to that of the character for husband, to emphasize their positive and pro-active dedication to the role of househusband. If such a movement were to grow strong, what sort of difference might it make to the marriage crisis in Japan, if any?

Erika Alpert: I address this near the end of the book, actually. One of the websites that I studied did actually have a sengyô shufu option. I don’t generally think much is going to come of that, and I think Japanese pop culture can be very quick to hop on a catchphrase and spin it out into a phenomenon that may or may not reflect actual lived experiences well. (You can see this in all of the discourse about ohitorisama, from the 2000s and 2010s, but every avocado toast joke about millennials also illustrates the point.)

Robert Marshall: Senda Yuki has written, “The idea that a married couple might enjoy a simple life together has never taken root in Japan.” Do you see any sense to this? If you think so, why does it seem to be the case, what might be preventing this from being the reality of married couples in Japan and the objective of people hunting for a marriage partner?

Erika Alpert: No, honestly, I don’t think there’s any sense in this, to the extent that I don’t think that the ideal of companionate marriage is necessarily the best or the most conducive to human happiness. And while it has been extensively exported from Europe and North America around the world, I don’t know that I would encourage its further spread. I think the companionate ideal is an imported one, that it has never fully rooted itself in Japanese ideas about, or experiences, of marriage, and I don’t think that necessarily needs questioning or solving. Not to be too much of a radical kinship scholar, but companionate marriage and nuclear families in isolated living quarters haven’t exactly served people well where this model has taken hold. I think we can imagine kinship bigger and better for ourselves. Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanagisako’s “Is There a Family” is a classic here that I come back to and think about all the time.
Mike Mena on Batgirl (2000-2006)

January 15th, 2025
The Silent Knight: Ideologies of Languagelessness in BATGIRL (2000-2006)

by Mike Mena

Why study comics? Simple: they reflect and refract ideologies present in everyday life. Comics are a politically saturated medium that can offer something different to our understanding of American pop-culture. Indeed, the themes and events in comics are often barely-disguised analogies to American life. For example, the character Scarecrow is a psychologist obsessed with fear and known for his hallucinogenic, fear-inducing gas. It is no coincidence that the Scarecrow character began to explicitly resemble a stereotypical terrorist in the months following 9/11. Again, comics refract our reality, even our fears.

My focus here is a less obvious example involving Cassandra Cain, codename: Batgirl. Over the first several pages of the series, we see racial signs and qualities being visually added to Batgirl (Mena 2024). For example, in the first images of Cassandra, her skin tone is quite literally tinted “yellow” in comparison to the surrounding bodies on the page. We eventually get the point: Cassandra is supposed to be a “Asian teen girl.” We might also expect this stereotype to come with specific bodily behaviors, such as “feminine passivity” and “quietness.”

But, here is the twist: Batgirl totally dominates!

What made Batgirl immediately fascinating to me was the problem she presented to the comic book medium itself. Batgirl couldn’t use language, which meant the main character of the story would not have dialogue. (And, no thought-bubbles either!) As a linguistic anthropologist, I was hooked.

I immediately noticed an increased dependence on other semiotic elements, or other signs that also communicate information. In particular, her facial expressions and bodily gestures would take on increased significance. And, that Batgirl’s mask is permanently stitched closed holds much symbolic potential. But, exactly why Batgirl can’t speak is the most fascinating part. Let’s review.

Cassandra Cain was abducted at birth and raised by an assassin who intentionally deprived her of all language (in a uniquely cruel and comic-bookie way). Why? As her captor/father’s logic went: depriving Cassandra of linguistic ability would focus her attention exclusively on reading the body, giving her the ability to predict her opponent’s moves. It made her lethal, undefeatable—unkillable.

Her mentor, Batman himself, described her fighting skills as perfect. I agreed. To me, she became the perfect Batgirl! But, perhaps I got too excited, too quickly. Soon the story would take a turn, a linguistic turn.

Let’s skip to what happens: she magically learns English. Well, to be clear, a random superhuman with psychic abilities “organized” her thoughts… for her… in English. Honestly, when I read this, I wasn’t quite sure how I felt at first. Thus far, my favorite element of this comic book was Batgirl’s lack of dialogue, because it precluded any straightforward character development that depended on text. That was exciting and novel.

Unfortunately, it became apparent that her new ability to understand English entirely disrupted her ability to read bodies. Cassandra went from being a “perfect” Batgirl to an utterly unremarkable one. In fact, the word “mediocre” would be selected by Batgirl herself to describe her entire new existence.

Why would learning English interfere with her ability to comprehend other kinds of communicatory signs? Or, rephrased: Why would learning English disrupt Batgirl’s ability to read bodies?

Well, it would not. But, in the United States many believe it would.

To understand where this ideological belief comes from, we need only to look how we treat bilingual children in the United States. There are many ideologies that shape our understanding of language learning and bilingual children, but let’s talk about the white supremacist ones—they are more entertaining and more relevant here.

We can start with a generalized aversion to language mixing (and/or code-switching). Not all mixing, just the kind perceived as coming from stigmatized folks. If we don’t like language mixture, that must mean we have some ideas about language purity. Many folks in the United States subscribe to the idea that putatively pure language allows for pure and unconfused thought. So, in a white supremacist culture, we might say stuff like:
- “Black English is a ‘broken’ version of (White Dominant) English.”
- “They don’t speak Spanish or English, they speak Spanglish, which is not a ‘real’ language.”
- “Don’ t let the students use Spanish in class, it will confuse their English.”
Put simply, when it comes to stigmatized bilinguals in the United States, we can count on two things: 1) their language(s) will always be seen as impure, confused, deficient, and mediocre; and 2) “Standard” English monolingualism is the norm in the United States.

In fact, scholars have noticed that some schools have a special designation for certain racialized students as not having any language whatsoever—in other words, they speak no institutionally legible language, and therefore said to have no language. Jonathan Rosa (2016) calls this the ideology of “languagelessness,” where a language user’s linguistic competence becomes questioned, and by extension, their entire personhood. Sadly, once English was added to Batgirl’s communicatory repertoire, she lost her ability to read body language. But, while she now understood English, she still could not speak, read, or write.

All things considered, what made possible her ability to reach perfection was her monolingualism. And, once the other language was added, the core of her identity was subtracted.

Clearly, we appear to have some strange ideologies regarding language and language learning. Yet, we might also remember another ideology always working in the background: “This is America and we (only) speak English.”

So, let’s ask again: Why study comic books? We are entering a new political age; one that thrives on pop-culture (mis)information and digital (il)literacies. And, comic books are just one more pop-culture medium capable of disseminating harmful ideologies at a massive scale. We would be wise to pay attention.

Credits:

“Cassandra Cain as BATGIRL” (2000-2006). Kelley Puckett (author), Scott Peterson

(author), Robert Camanella (artist), and Damion Scott (artist).

Mena, Mike (2024). “How to ‘Become White’: A Dummies guide to Semiotic whitening.”

YouTube video: https://youtu.be/YB4HG1Ohzko?si=9UHob1qO2zeHa_dG

Rosa, Jonathan Daniel. 2016. “Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies across Communicative Contexts.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 26 (2): 162–83.
Fred Myers and Terry Smith on their book, Six Paintings from Papunya

January 13th, 2025

https://www.dukeupress.edu/six-paintings-from-papunya

Jennifer Biddle: As a way of beginning, could you briefly introduce yourselves, and what brought you together on this project. Why this book now?

Fred Myers:   People in Australia– including art critics and art historians — have been criticizing anthropology as a framework for Indigenous art for a long time. Indigenous Australian critics in particular objected to Indigenous works being placed in ethnographic or natural history museums rather than in art galleries considered higher status, recognizing artistry rather than culture. As an ethnographer of Western Desert people, I have documented many paintings and the place of this work in people’s lives affords me knowledge that is relevant to the paintings and their subject matter. Terry is one of the main Australian art historians with a sustained interest and engagement with Aboriginal art, theorizing its placement in the field of contemporary art. We have been in discussion about Indigenous Australian art since the 1990s.

In 2022, near the end of the pandemic, numerous Papunya Tula works were exhibited at the Australian Consul General’s Residency in New York, on loan from two collections, those of John and Barbara Wilkerson, and Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield. When Terry was in New York, we decided to visit, look at the paintings and discuss them, record it, and make that the basis of some writing.   We wanted to show those less familiar that these works merited serious consideration as individual works of art. This kind of attention to specific paintings was finally emerging—in exhibitions and in John Kean’s recent book on the innovations of early Papunya Tula art [Dot Circle and Frame: The Making of Papunya Tula Art, Perth: Upswell Publishing2023]. We were aware of the persistence of the unfortunate ethnography/art history binary in the Western art world. We hoped to show that by combining Terry’s more formal analysis and my knowledge of the stories, people, places, and cultural contexts, we could illuminate how the artists chose to put their millennia-old painting traditions into two-dimensional form to show others.

Terry Smith: Indigenous art has posed a great, and productive, challenge to art historians, especially since it became a powerful component of contemporary art.

During my art history training at the University of Melbourne in the mid-1960s, and then at the University of Sydney, Indigenous art appeared only when Picasso visited museums in Paris, then, shockingly, painted Iberian and Africa masks on the heads of the naked women in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Despite various developments around so-called primitivism, few understood this art to be a contemporaneous kind of contemporary art.

Until, in the 1980s, when the extraordinary paintings and sculptures by Indigenous artists in remote communities in north and central Australia began to be circulated by curators, and non-Indigenous contemporary artists responded to them in their own work. In the 1990s, suddenly, both kinds of art historical contemporaneity became possible, more visible, then undeniable.

I was updating Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting, the basic textbook for the field, then twenty years out of date. I saw the need for a chapter on this new art movement, so I undertook research trips to several remote communities, country towns, and inner cities throughout Australia. Many small revelations and one big one followed: that Australian Aboriginal Art was not only a contemporaneous kind of contemporary art, but also its advent—unpredicted, multiplicitous, self-generative and undeniably powerful—suggested that several other major artistic developments occurring throughout the world, many with comparable qualities, were themselves contemporaneous. In short, contemporary art was not a style imposed on the rest of the world by the major art centers. My own subsequent books on contemporary art, some of them now widely used textbooks, have been shaped by this realisation. [For example, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Lawrence King, and Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2011 and 2012).]

In Australia, a dense discourse has arisen around this art, with a growing number of Indigenous voices, the artists themselves, curators, critics, administrators and historians, leading the field. The Yamatji curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist has written a wonderful, acute Afterword for the book. He cites Bandjalungcurator Djon Mundine’s condemnation of the “tournaments taken up between the imperial Houses of Anthropology and Art History.” Very few of us, I think, have been able to combine these discourses to provide, let’s say, the thick descriptions of the best (that is, radically reflexive) anthropology with the micro- and macro-scale accounts of the best (also, radically reflexive) art history. Perhaps our book shows that we are riding side by side, not aiming at each other.

Jennifer Biddle: The book focuses on six paintings from a substantive archive, numerous national and international collections, early and more recent paintings. Why did you select these works?

Fred Myers: We decided to look closely at the early paintings. I knew many of the artists and what they said they were doing. The paintings are well documented; they are from the early period that marks the development of the art movement. We picked paintings for what they seemed to offer aesthetically (formally) and, because of my knowledge of the painter and context. The choice to begin with Kingsley Norris’s seemingly simple painting was Terry’s idea, to start with what seemed to be the earliest painting, in which the dotting was most limited. Others were paintings from men who were dedicated painters, making work that seemed particularly inventive. Four of the paintings were favourites with qualities I wanted to understand better. For one, the enclosure in Wartuma’s painting The Trial [the cover image of the book] shows the importance of understanding mythological and geographical dimensions that motivate the artist. These works also have strong iconographic dimensions, as I have argued, significant for the artist. For me, this project has been an effort to understand what the painters thought they were doing with their work and how they brought intention into visual form. Each painting is an attempt to bring experience(s) of place, story (mythological events), and ceremonial performance into two-dimensional form. Some men were really drawn to this activity and demonstrated virtuosity worthy of sustained attention, what I have called a local art history.

Terry Smith: Fred has identified our main motivations. We were, of course, constrained by what was available in the exhibition: thirteen paintings from the early years at Papunya, 1971 to 1976, all from the Wilkerson’s superb collection of 50 works from that period. To give some context, 1,200 to 1,500 paintings on various kinds of board were produced at Papunya between 1971 and 1973 by more than 40 artists. A much smaller number of artists, half that, made most of these. We are in dialogue with the many interpretations of Papunya painting: the records of the many art advisors who worked at Papunya Tula, the original accounts of Geoff Bardon, the scholarship of Vivien Johnson and others, and the important exhibitions of curators such as Bernice Murphy, Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman Hetti Perkins, Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra woman Brenda L Croft, Henry Skerritt, and others. The Introduction maps this art historiography in some detail.

My art critical instincts led me to focus us on the originary moment around May 1971; thus we begin with Kingsley Tjungurrayi’s Stars, Rain, and Lightning at Night, the third work listed in the first record of these paintings. We then follow developments to the later months of 1972, when a dozen or so of the men were painting together in a corrugated iron shed at Papunya, many on an almost daily basis. This gave us the chance to evoke the interaction between them as they shared information about their Dreaming [Ancestral, mythological] stories and visual ideas about how to paint them. Some photographs suggest how intense this must have been. But the paintings are the best evidence. Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi working on his Classic Pintupi Water Dreaming alongside Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula as he creates his masterpiece Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa. To me, these interactions are on a par with some of the most celebrated collaborations in the history of art.

The outcome is a dialogue between an anthropologist/ethnographer and an art critic/historian/theorist that has generated 4 to 6,000 words about each painting. This is not exceptional when it comes to passages in books on well-known, even middling, artists working in Western traditions. Indigenous artists in Australia, however, are usually less well served: mostly, a few bland sentences about what the authors understand to be the story underlying the painting are followed by a few more sentences about the medium and the technique used to present it.

Jennifer Biddle: You center paintings as active material agents, whose work is neither finished nor replete. “The conversation” of the subtitle is as much between you two as between the paintings and audience(s): their instigations, engagements, affective and effective potencies. “Our responsibility is to open ourselves to these objects, to see as best we can what they have to say, and to say what it is that we are seeing” (2024: xii). You also identify the “politics of the gift” (2024:17 ff).   Could you reflect on what you mean by this gift, this responsibility?

Fred Myers: The question of how this work enters into the broader field of art came up as we went beyond initial conversations. I have always been taken by the Pintupi painters’ discussion of “giving” (yunginpa) the paintings, the same word often used for the ceremonial transfer of knowledge (as a gift), or sometimes to speak of revealing (which is a form of giving). I knew that the artist Bobby West Tjupurrula, a co-curator of the major retrospective Tjungunutja: From having come together [with Sid Anderson, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Michael Nelson Jagamarra AM, Joseph Jurrah Tjapaltjarri, and Luke Scholes, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, 2017] spoke of the paintings as a gift that needed to be reciprocated, with payment analogous to moments when young men might give meat to elders in return for the revelation of knowledge. So, we had to reflect on what we were doing in this analytical work. These works had been sent out into the world, coming to us in some ways as a gift and we have envisioned our response to the works as a return, hoping to render more clearly what the gift is and to help generate the responses they deserve. The painters insisted to me very early in my own research, that the paintings were not made up but dear, and the Law. The stories, designs, and places are identified with or belong to persons who alone have the right to show or paint them. Even if given, the rights to paint, to reproduce, remain with the person with whom it is identified… and thus, anthropologists have learned, they are inalienable, tied to this ancestral authority and identity. That is the subject of much of my writing; in this experiment, we focus on the works’ visual dimension but we do not want to reduce their presence and their ontological value to that alone.

We tried to make the book intelligible in the field of meanings the painters claim. We wanted the works to be seen as objects of intensity and affect that incite a response requiring serious attention, drawing the viewer into understanding something powerful and moving, eliciting from us, perhaps, something we don’t know?

But there was also something else in choosing to pursue the theme of the gift: to challenge the treatment of the paintings as simply commodities, for sale, and to render the participation of Western Desert painters in the contemporary art world on their own terms, to accept the complexity of the differences presented.

Terry Smith: Fred describes well the politics of the gift in play in this situation, as we strive to move (from Mauss to Fabian, you might say) towards a genuinely coeval exchange, one that embodies the qualities that should be present in all exchanges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, given the systemic inequities of colonisation. Last year, 60% voted against the proposal that the First People of Australia be acknowledged in our Constitution and permitted a formal Voice in the Parliament. This is racism in its most obdurate form. Does it evaporate in the clean-lined spaces of art museums, or in books about art, even those as elegant as this one?

For moments, perhaps, it can be reframed by what we might call the poetics of the gift. This emerges within response to paintings when evidence is gathered, when external knowledge, and rational inference has accounted for all it can, and inferred insight into form-making processes has exhausted itself. At that moment, paintings can retreat into rightful opacity. We were delighted that such moments occurred in our discussions. Right there, right then, the artists have called up the most valuable gift that we can offer in return: our capacity (if only partial, if incomplete, by necessity) for intuitive identification, for analytical insight, and, hopefully, for words that enable rather than block appreciation.

Jennifer Biddle: In the Introduction you mention a milestone exhibition in 2023, Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu (Past & Present Together): 50 Years of Papunya Tula Artists opening at the new Australian embassy in Washington, DC, including Fred, your editing of the exhibition catalogue with Henry Skerritt (Curator, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection) and the hosting in Washington of Papunya Tula artists at the Opening.

This framing strikes me as critical for this moment and what are now 37 community-based art centres across the Central and Western Desert (Desart Inc https://desart.com.au/member-art-centres/map/ ) in terms of the ways art production serves to sustain life lived-on county, in place; speaking and maintaining vernacular; the remote art economy; a history of community agency and mobilising force; of “vivification of Indigenous cultural modalities” as Gilchrist (2024:88) models in his Afterword, within ongoing colonial, extractive capitalism, neo-liberal and market-driven tendencies to commodify Aboriginal culture and identity. Could you speak to this 50-year history and the impact of the Western Desert art movement?

Fred Myers: The timing of our book with the celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the Papunya Tula cooperative is significant. From my perspective as long-time observer and friend to the painters and Papunya Tula, this goes back to the art/ethnography binary; to not excising the artworks from their total place and meaning in the local tradition; that is part of their trajectory. And that trajectory is clear: the circulation (and sale) of these works has provided material support for people to live in their communities on country, has provided prestige and recognition for them as artists, which provides support in the public eye, and they provide recognition for Indigenous people and the significance of connections to land in the broader public imagination in the Australian national landscape. For Papunya Tula, the trajectory of self-determination as supported through artwork culminated in their creation of the Purple House, the Indigenous NGO that they built themselves to provide culturally sensitive dialysis based in remote communities. This has enabled patients to remain on country with kin and able to gain the health benefits of being close to community and to transmit knowledge to younger generations. As an anthropologist, I cannot help but look at the work of art as a practice, a form of activity and not just a piece of aesthetic activity – as the artists said to me, the paintings are not ngunytji, not just made up.

Terry Smith: Fred has just listed several value chains that were generated by the Papunya artists and sustained by them and their supporters for over fifty years—this duration is in itself remarkable when it comes to art movements. But it is not miraculous when we see how grounded it is in local community values and cosmologies, and how important the business of making and selling artworks is to sheer survival in circumstances, often, of severe scarcity.

The kinds of value embodied in these paintings, and activated as they circulate, cannot be reduced to the prices they generate on the art market. There are, in fact, several markets, operating simultaneously, each according to their quixotic logics. The most extreme generate headlines, especially when spectacular prices are reached, and instances of exploitation exposed, no surprise for commodity exchange under capitalist conditions. Yet all this, we would argue, is a sideshow to the core achievement of the artists: the extraordinary artistic and social values they create.

Fred hints at the wider social impact of art practices like that at Papunya, those that were contemporaneous at Yuendumu, at Ernabella and elsewhere, spreading to become the Desart Inc. network you describe in your question, having an impact on non-Indigenous Australians, especially those who take their sovereignty for granted. Powerful works such as The Aboriginal Memorial made by Ramingining elders as a counter-memorial during the 1988 Bicentennial Celebrations of White Settlement, and knock-out exhibitions such as Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius during the Sydney Olympics in 2000, joined countless other demonstrations of the Indigenous capacity for complex, subtle self-imagining. In the early 2000s, the movement as a whole, and desert painting in particular, was a major factor in advancing the agenda of national reconciliation. Meanwhile, Indigenous artists based in the major cities, problematizing White supremacy and imposed Indigeneity—I’m thinking of Gordon Bennett, Tracey Moffatt, and Daniel Boyd, amongst others—have been acknowledged as significant innovators within contemporary art, itself now an international phenomenon, especially in the biennials that continue to proliferate in cities worldwide. Archie Moore’s amazing installation kith and kin won the main prize at the Venice Biennale last year.

Indigenous artists have been at work within their communities, and between them and other communities, for millennia. Secret sacred material must remain the preserve of the initiated; protocols involved must be respected. As Stephen Gilchrist notes in his Afterword, Fred and I have done as best we can, with deep care. We have also, we hope, demonstrated that these paintings invite, and can sustain, detailed interpretation of a kind that draws on our disciplines, as much as it challenges them, requiring us to learn new ways of seeing. We believe this is true of much other art made by First Nations peoples in this country. Indigenous thinkers and scholars are leading this effort to fully value the output of their artists, past, present and emerging, and we hope that our conversation may prove useful to this great enterprise.
Gerald Roche on his book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet

January 6th, 2025

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501777783/the-politics-of-language-oppression-in-tibet

Shannon Ward: Your book deals centrally with the biopolitics of language oppression, charting how techniques of governance institutionalize the elimination of Manegacha. In Chapter 6, in particular, you show how biopolitics reaches into interpersonal relationships. I was struck, however, with the book’s opening scene, where a girl insists she understands her father’s Manegacha, and with the survey data you present that emphasizes the enduring significance of Manegacha to its speakers. Do you see any social spaces where the value of Manegacha is emphasized, perhaps subtly and even in response to efforts for elimination?

Gerald Roche: I think there are still a few social and physical spaces where the value of Manegacha is emphasized. These spaces are really important, because they essentially act as life rafts for the language. Unfortunately, I think they’re also decreasing. Here, I’ll just focus on one example of a physical space.

The most significant space for the language is the four villages where the majority of Manegacha speakers live. I think it’s important to emphasize that people choose to speak the language in those spaces, as a reflection of the values they expressed in the household surveys I conducted. Most adult Manegacha speakers today are at least bilingual, in Manegacha and the local variety of spoken Tibetan. Many of them also know some form of Mandarin as well. So, with the exception of some members of the eldest generation who really rely only on Manegacha to communicate with people, it would be possible for pretty much everyone in those villages to stop using Manegacha with each other, and to communicate only in other languages. I think we need to recognize this for the decision it is, and for the fact that people make it every day, in the context of immense pressure to eliminate Manegacha.

I’m not sure if resistance is the best word to use to describe this situation, however. Resistance, to me, implies a level of collective organization and an explicit oppositional stance of some sort, and I didn’t see much of either of these. So instead, I described that decision as a practice of endurance, taking the term from Elizabeth Povinelli’s work. Although I think that term works fine in the book, more recently I’ve been reading the social movement literature, and there are several useful terms there that apply equally well, such as Asef Bayat’s concept of a non-movement, or the anthropologist Julia Eckert’s concept of practice movements: “forms of unorganized, collective action, which are distinct from conventional social movements in various ways, first and foremost by their direct expression of goals in their practices.”

Villages provide a safe space for these practice movements, where Manegacha speakers have some relief from the relentless everyday discrimination they face from other Tibetans. Of course, those spaces don’t completely isolate the community from those pressures, and that’s why so many families are choosing to withhold Manegacha from their children now. But they do provide some relief. However, the villages are being swallowed up by the growth of a nearby town, and so those safe spaces are being dismantled. That’s partly what the image on the book’s cover shows us – how the presence of Manegacha speaking communities is erased by the construction of Tibetan space and identity.

Shannon Ward: You trace chronological changes from the mid-20^th century, when Manegacha speakers used their language in a rich range of cultural practices, to the present, when dynamics of language oppression overdetermine speakers’ decisions to use Tibetan (or even Mandarin). In Chapter 5, for example, you describe how state-building has advanced elimination. Yet, there are possible worlds where Manegacha could have been included in state-building (pp. 116-117). In these pages, you assert that describing such possibilities helps to illuminate the violence of erasure. Are there instances, however, in which these possibilities are actively articulated or reflected on by Manegacha speakers? And, are there areas outside of the purview of the state where these possibilities could be actualized?

Gerald Roche: Manegacha speakers do articulate these sort of alternative possibilities – not necessarily the full range that I described, but there are examples.

One of the things that came up in my conversations with Manegacha speakers was a range of vernacular writing practices in the language. There’s no standard written form of the language encoded in textbooks or taught in formal contexts. But people in the community have repeatedly been motivated enough to develop their own systems to write the language and use it to communicate with small networks of friends. Some people use Tibetan script, some use Chinese characters, and others use the Roman alphabet.

Another example came from social media. When I started doing this research, just over ten years ago, smart phones and social media were still somewhat recent. There was a fair bit of enthusiasm among Manegacha speakers for making little media clips in the language: dubbing over a cartoon for example. I haven’t been able to see how this has developed since the growth of platforms like Tiktok, and it would be fascinating to see how Manegacha speakers are using that.

Anyway, in both cases, I think we see examples where people are motivated to try out pushing the language, at a very small scale, into spaces where it has been excluded from, such as formal education and mass media. If we take that together with the strong attachment to the language that I recorded in the household surveys, to me it raises an important question about how things could have been otherwise, under different conditions. Prompting the political imagination in those sort of ways not only helps bring to the forefront the current oppression that exists, which is what I try to do in the book, but it also hopefully helps create a sort of current where the practice movement amongst Manegacha speakers might grow to become something else.

Shannon Ward: In your writing, you made an active choice not to openly depict slurs against Manegacha and other minoritized language speakers, instead describing the general translations of these terms or representing them as slashes. Can you say more about how and why you made this decision in representation?

Gerald Roche: I thought about this in relation mostly to one particular term that is used to describe Manegacha speakers. It took a lot of time and reflection to come to the conclusion that the term was in fact a slur. When you are in a different social and cultural context, in a different language, problematic terms don’t always necessarily jump out at you as they would in more familiar circumstances, and that’s especially true when those terms are normalized in the local context, even by the people who are labelled with the slur.

Reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks really helped me think through how slurs work – the “crushing objecthood” that they impose on people. I also found Jane Hill’s writing on the topic in The Everyday Language of White Racism helpful, as was some of Judith Butler’s writing, for example Excitable Speech. In the end I described a slur as a sort of ‘semiotic landmine’ that releases a sudden, harmful blast of negative associations and implications, and I think that’s a reasonable description of how this term works in practice.

Once I concluded that the term was a slur, the decision that I found myself faced with was – do I want to introduce this term into the English language? There are important debates to be had about how slurs in English can have complex social lives and sometimes allow for what Michael Hertzfeld called ‘cultural intimacy’: the use of sources of stigma to foster collective belonging. But the slur I was dealing with would be unknown to pretty much anyone reading the book, so why create knowledge of a harmful term where none existed, and run the risk that the harm of the term was amplified, showed up in new spaces, and so on? Similarly, I tried to imagine, while writing the book, how it would be read by someone from the Manegacha speaking community. Why go to the trouble of explaining how this everyday term is actually a slur, and then just repeatedly expose them to it? That seems callous to me.

In addition, I also think that eliding the term dramatizes it and gives the reader increased impetus for reflection. Because I do that explicitly, in a novel context, and because the absence of the term is visually striking, the reader is forced to slow down, and hopefully to consider their own stance on the politics of slurs.

Shannon Ward: In the Introduction and Conclusion, you write about the shift in your approach from endangerment linguistics (pp. 5-6) to one of decolonizing solidarity (pp. 154-156). What do you see as the role of language documentation and other traditional language revitalization tools in decolonizing solidarity?

Gerald Roche: The traditional suite of methods and techniques that have emerged in linguistics and allied fields since the late 1980s and the emergence of endangerment linguistics are not the most effective tools for bringing about the changes that are required to secure language rights and end language oppression. However, sometimes they are the only tools we have.

One reason that we have access to a limited toolkit is that most of our work is done at the behest of donors, whether private or public, and also requires some kind of institutional buy-in from a university. Shrinking funding pools and the neoliberalization of the university creates a bad environment for coming up with new ideas, but does create lots of incentives to tweak and redeploy existing tools. This set up also encourages people to use toolkits that seem, superficially apolitical, though of course they have their own politics.

A second reason why it is important to rely on this toolkit is that in large swathes of the world, basic civil and political rights do not exist. If they did, people would be more likely to already be agitating for the change they need, and our job would be to support that. But in China, for example, that’s not possible. So we can either abandon communities in those situations to state violence, or we find other ways to work with them. I think finding other ways is the right choice. So we take the superficially apolitical tools we have and do what we can with them in those contexts.

If we use them mindfully, those tools can help build decolonial solidarity in several ways. Maps, for example, are one way of countering hegemonic efforts to erase particular groups, such as Manegacha speakers. They help render visible what the state attempts to destroy, and create a permanent, public record that counteracts denial and diminishes impunity. Surveys provide a chance to counter harmful assumptions that facilitate assimilation, for example, the data I collected showing people’s deep attachment to their language contradicted victim-blaming narratives which suggested that the community simply didn’t care enough to maintain their own language. Finally, research activities also provide opportunities for the redistribution of material and symbolic resources, for example, I tried to make sure that I spent my research funding in ways that supported Manegacha speakers.

Shannon Ward: In the Conclusion, you draw a distinction between settler colonies and exploitation colonies (pp. 151-152). Do you see each of these contexts as lending itself to a particular form of decolonizing solidarity? That is, are there particular approaches to decolonization required in exploitation colonies that have not been adequately recognized or supported by scholars?

Gerald Roche: I think the debates around decolonization certainly have been patchy, though I’m not sure that the division necessarily lies along a divide between settler colonies and exploitation colonies. India is perhaps a good starting point to try and explain what I mean.

We have vast amounts of literature looking at India as a British exploitation colony, but discussion of India as a contemporary colonial state is less prominent, even though the relationship between the Indian state and Kashmir, the Adivasis, and the entire northeast (at least) are all classically colonial. Ethiopia is another good example. Before the modern nation-state of Ethiopia was formed, it was a classical colonial empire, with patches of settlement and exploitation, and yet a recent handbook on settler colonialism talked about Ethiopia only in terms of its invasion by Italian fascists, and much of the analysis of the recent Tigray war elided the roots of the conflict in Ethiopian empire building.

As these two brief examples hopefully suggest, we tend to take colonization as a sort of vanity project that only Westerners can engage in. If anyone else is doing it, then it’s just domination, or even worse, putatively national liberation. This is certainly part of the reason why the colonial relation between China and Tibet remains so under-analyzed.

On the other hand, when people do analyze Tibet as a colonial situation, there is a tendency to simply apply models of what happened in Canada, or Australia, or the USA. Instead of denying the colonial relationship, we erase its specificities. So, for example, although I think settler colonialism plays a role in Tibet, I think we need to look at how settlement by Han people is part of a broader, and unique, colonial strategy in Tibet.

Understanding the specificities of different sites and systems of oppression is essential to building thick solidarity as I discuss in the book’s conclusion. Refusing to impose historical and analytical templates developed in the Australia or the USA is also essential to building decolonial solidarity. Ultimately, I want the book to contribute to dismantling systems of language oppression that Manegacha speakers face. We can’t do that by cutting and pasting tactics and concepts from other places. Our solidarity requires us to do the work of understanding what we are actually trying to change.
John Mathias on his book, Uncommon Cause

December 30th, 2024

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/uncommon-cause/paper

Chip Zuckerman: Thank you, John, for engaging with me about your new book. I should start by telling readers that we went to graduate school together and have swapped many things over the years. This means that by the time your book reached my house, I had already seen most of it in one form or another. (In a co-authored article, we even wrote together about some of its materials (Zuckerman and Mathias 2022)!) But all these years later, while you might think this familiarity would make the book feel like an old hat arriving in the mail, I felt the opposite. It has been so satisfying to see its once rough and drafty parts coalesce and elevate into this single, polished, and fresh piece.

The book, for those yet to encounter it, traces the stories of activists in Kerala, India to probe a recognizable ethical dilemma: how can one live for what one thinks is right when other people, including people we love, get in the way? With that, let me start my questions with a question about the book’s style of writing.

The book is written beautifully. This makes it something one can sit down with and comfortably dive into. It also means it will be an excellent teaching text, which foregrounds the stories of particular people. But good writing takes work and sacrifice: you surely trimmed some prized detail, omitted some theoretical tangles not directly on your story’s path, and killed at least a handful of darlings. Can you tell me about your choice to write Uncommon Cause as you did?

John Mathias: Partly, I think the book’s story-based style just came naturally to me; it’s connected with how I think and the nature of my fieldwork style. When I was in the field, my notes came to focus on puzzles or questions that the people I was spending time with were asking—puzzles about the difficulty of mediatizing and circulating evidence of what people experienced as smelly pollution, for example, or about the paradoxical importance of fighting for the people to activists who actively distinguished themselves from what they saw as common or ordinary people. As the months went by, I watched people work through these puzzles in various ways. Not that they necessarily resolved them; sometimes they seemed to become more lost or trapped in them. But by watching how their stories unfolded, I could learn something about how the puzzle was structured and why it was puzzling,g so to speak. So many of the stories in the book were already there—in my fieldnotes but also on my mind—when I began writing.

Later in the writing process, as you suggest, I also foregrounded the stories deliberately. This was part of choosing an audience and a rhetorical angle. On audience, I wanted the book to speak to a broad readership, beyond academia, and I thought that leading with stories, rather than the literature, would do that best. As I went, I found myself less interested in whether my readers could place a particular puzzle within scholarly debates; it was more important that they could place them alongside their own experiences. I wanted them to feel the puzzles as real—to feel inspired by what inspired the activists in the book, to feel trapped when they felt trapped. And I hoped that these feelings would resonate with readers’ own experiences of desiring to live for some larger purpose or of fearing that such a purpose, if strongly held, might alienate them from their family and friends. My long-running writing group also encouraged me to lean into this, and as I wrote and revised, I deliberately elaborated on the stories of particular activists while putting much of the engagement with other scholars into the book’s subtext and footnotes.

Rhetorically, this also seemed the right tack. The book is deeply moral, but not moralizing. The activists I describe ask questions about how people ought to live; and the book, in its own way, pursues those same questions. But it does not offer any overriding answer or program for how to live; I do not, for example, make the case that we should all be more like activists. The activists in the book often disagreed about the best kind of life, after all, and their stories are full of uncertainty and contradiction. But people can learn from stories even when those stories do not have clear lessons or morals, or even satisfying endings. Stories can offer a chance to sort of feel out the stakes in another form of life from the inside—and, ideally, to appreciate how these stakes could be relevant to our own lives. In this way, stories are good for thinking through real moral dilemmas, the resolution of which (as Wittgenstein suggests) cannot be reduced to any abstract formula but must be worked out within particular circumstances and relationships.

Chip Zuckerman: In part because the book is written so accessibly, it eschews some of the in-the-weeds discussion of how its arguments relate to the anthropology of ethics, a turn that really got going leading up to and during your fieldwork. I know that you were steeped in this stuff in graduate school, because I was steeped right alongside you. Can you tell me a bit more about how you see your central argument relating to some of the big pushes in the anthropology of ethics? For instance, how does your argument relate to Laidlaw’s (2002) early argument about the need for an account of freedom, or the critique of Durkheim’s effort to make “the moral congruent with the social,” as Zigon (2007:132) put it?

John Mathias: You’re right that I was deep in this literature as I was getting into fieldwork, and it shaped my interests. One thing that drew me to study environmental activists in Kerala is that some of them (especially the more radical environmentalists that I caption as solidarity activists in the book) seemed deeply committed to principles of moral freedom and practices of critical reflection. In some sense, they took an ethics of freedom to one possible extreme: they sought to break free from the norms of their inherited communities and practice a more liberated and rational mode of ethics. So I wanted to understand what happens when people try to do that.

I think the book still presents that story. But as I dug deeper, I also found that some of the founding contrasts of the ethical turn, especially the critique of Durkheim, seemed to take one side in a debate that I was seeing worked out, and never fully won, on the ground. The emphasis in much of that work on freedom, for instance, did align closely with how some activists described their own lives, but the more time I spent with those activists, the more I saw how difficult distinctions between freedom and unfreedom, or between critical and uncritical, were for them to sustain in practice. More to the point, there was a whole subset of activists (those I call locals in the book) who seemed to see their activism in a much different way—not as a break with norms and social groups, but rather as grounded in belonging to communities. One could say, superficially, that these activists exemplified a Durkheimian approach to ethics rather than a late-Foucauldian approach, but that dichotomy would not do justice to the many ways that the stakes in solidarity activism and local activism overlapped. Ultimately, I came to see that, while the freedom/unfreedom opposition (what some caption as a distinction between“ethics and socially-enforced morality) resonated with how some activists’ described their lives, to adopt this opposition as an analytic would be to favor some ways of doing activism over others—and, moreover, to perpetuate some Western ideologies about the centrality of individual freedom and impartiality to ethics. The light the distinction threw was not worth the shadows it cast.

My distinction between living for and living from is an attempt to better capture these dynamics, whether they unfold on the streets of Kerala or on the pages of journals like Anthropological Theory and JRAI. I understand living for and living from as distinct aspects of ethical life, which can come into tension. But they are neither inherently opposed nor fundamentally aligned—their opposition or alignment is produced by the ideologies and reflexive practices of actual people, working to oppose or align them. I find a metaphor from sailing helpful: like current and wind, they can flow together or against one another, but navigating ethical life is a matter of contending with both at once.

Chip Zuckerman: You write: “[t]he quandaries that define the struggle for environmental justice in Kerala are rooted in dilemmas we all face. Each form of activist life speaks to tensions in the form of human life” (pg. 3). And in a few other moments in the book, you return to this point, arguing that the central problem that activists face—and the central problem of the book—is relevant to us all. Can you talk a bit about this, how do you see the relation between the activist form of life and human life more generally?

John Mathias: What I mean by this is, most concretely, that everyone sometimes faces dilemmas that look something like the dilemmas these activists face. Not every life is defined, as some activists’ are, by choices between radical norm-breaking and community belonging—for example, facing potential estrangement from one’s family over one’s commitment to marrying across caste. But we all experience some version of this at some point—whether to take the side of a bullied classmate and risk being ostracized oneself; whether to keep going to mosque in college; whether to reveal, over Thanksgiving turkey, that one has become vegan.

All of these experiences are rooted in the entanglement of relationships and ethics—in the reality that ethics is, inevitably, a way of relating to other people. Yet they are troubling experiences because ethics is not simply another word for social connectedness; ethics combines living for and living from, and these two aspects of ethics can conflict, even for those who work hard to keep them aligned. In that sense, the book suggests that at least some tension between the two aspects is inevitable.

The ubiquity of this tension is not, however, what I want to underline. On the contrary, my more far-reaching point is that living for and living from are not inherently opposed. I want to push back against those who overstate the tension. To see what I mean, think, for instance, of the longstanding tendency in Western moral philosophy to purify ethics of living from, under the rubric of impartiality. Environmental ethics, in its challenge to anthropocentrism, has been seen by some as an extreme (and laudable) form of this push for impartiality. Debates about anthropocentrism have largely focused on how non-humans should be valued by humans. I intervene in those debates, in part, by asking not about values but about practices of evaluating—by studying ethics in action. Studying environmentalists ethnographically, it was clear that even highly eco-centric ethics was largely a matter of navigating relationships with other people (and, in the case of some religious activists, relationships with non-human evaluators). Even when people sought to uproot their values from any grounding in particular groups (their families, their castes, their species, their planet, and so on), they enacted this project by breaking with some people and forming community with others. In this sense, relationships between humans remain central to environmental ethics.

Chip Zuckerman: In chapter’s 3, 4, and the conclusion you draw parallels between DuBois’s (2007) notion of the “stance triangle” and the dilemmas that activists face. Here is a reproduction of that stance triangle for those unfamiliar:

I think this analogy is powerful. But getting meta, your use of the analogy also bears a familiar shape. The shape is this: the details of a semiotic and/or more narrowly linguistic process become a model for some more general (and temporally dispersed) pattern of culture. We could think, for instance, of Levi-Strauss’s (1963) use of Troubetzkoy’s and Jakobson’s structuralism to talk not about the sounds of language, but about culture generally, or the more recent use of the phatic function to characterize patterns of sociality and their roles as infrastructure (Elyachar 2010), or the notion of the “subjunctive” to characterize a kind of politics (Ahmann 2019). This is a giant question, too giant for this kind of conversation, but I cannot resist asking what you think of this analogic shape, and more generally, the relation between the stance triangle as a way of characterizing a particular semiotic moment, on the one hand, and its use here to understand a more enduring emphasis someone might have—for instance, someone might emphasize attending to their relations with others (the alignment line in the triangle) over and against their commitment to a value (the evaluation line in the triangle)?

John Mathias: This is a big question. I’d start by underlining that, as you suggest, the book does not aim to show perduring patterns in activist stance taking—for example, by tracking the prevalence of alignment in evaluative acts. This would be a really interesting project, but it was not mine. I did, however, record quite a bit of interaction in the field. Carefully transcribing some of these recordings was important to studying ethics as an activity. But the transition from alignment of utterances to alignment of lives was more about understanding activists’ ideologies about how ethical evaluation should work.

By diagramming the interdependence of the intersubjective (subject-subject) and evaluative (subject-object) aspects of ethics, the triangle offered a way to think through how this interdependence became problematic in activism. It captured a core moral problem for some activists: how to free their lives from the influence of social ties, to live only for their causes. It also helped to describe a contrasting approach to activism, in which cause should come from community. More generally, it helped to think through questions about how to balance the desire to stand for what one believes, regardless of what others think (arguably the hallmark of an activist ethics), with the desire for community belonging, which might be considered morally valuable in its own right.

It is also worth noting that the parallel you point to is arguably already present in DuBois’ article, insofar as he speaks of degrees of alignment not only of subject positions in specific stance acts but also as a property of speakers in conversation. To wit, he defines alignment as “the calibrating relationship between two stances, and by implication two stancetakers” (2007, 144). Much rests on “implication” here, of course, and in my reading it is not clear to what extent DuBois thinks of the triangle as a tool for analyzing not only stance acts but also the diachronic positioning of participants—let alone such extended modes of stance-taking as the living of an activist life. But I found the triangle valuable for the latter mode of analysis because it clarified the defining stakes, for my interlocutors, in what it meant to be an activist.

And it did so in a way that made the condition I noted above—that ethics is a way of relating to others—visually apparent. Many have reflected on this condition, of course; Adam Smith, Erving Goffman, and Judith Butler are a few others I looked to. But the stance triangle version of this argument has that helpful combination of being both very abstract and very easy to grasp.

Chip Zuckerman: Your book takes you in a variety of interesting theoretical and empirical directions. For this final question, I wonder if you could give us all a sense of one path you chose not to take. What was left out, and is what you left on the cutting board for this book shaping what is to come for you?

John Mathias: As I was writing the book, I kept bumping up against the boundaries of ethics as a category. Especially, I thought a lot about activist discourse about self-interest, which for those I studied and for many moral philosophers is seen as a kind of defining opposition for ethics. In the book, I question the interests/values dichotomy both in activist discourse and in some anthropology and philosophy. And this, in turn, led me to think about the utility of the category of ethics itself; I settled on motive as a broader domain within which one could inquire about interests, values, and other notions of what makes people do what they do.

Motive is so core to theories of social life, yet we lack rigorous engagement with theories of motive in anthropology. Given the overwhelming emphasis of current anthropological analysis on motion—on practices, processes, social action, and so on—it seems we need to look more carefully at the motives driving the motion. So lately I’ve been thinking about how anthropological inquiry can more explicitly and rigorously explore motives. With the support of a Wenner Gren grant, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with some really brilliant minds on that (yours included, Chip!), and I am looking forward to publishing on it in the next year or two.

Empirically and methodologically, I’m excited about some new directions as well. As climate change has transformed environmental politics, I’ve become concerned with how we think about long-term futures. I’ve recently done some more applied, community-engaged work related to climate change in the US, and I’ve noticed how this genre of research tends to focus on relatively short-term problems even as we recognize that the temporal scale of climate change is vast. Some of the activists I write about in the book have noticed a similar pattern. For example, coastal fishing populations in Kerala are protesting various government efforts to relocate them, which are put forward as a way of preparing for sea level rise (that is, climate adaptation) but will also make way for a planned coastal highway. The protests are aimed at stopping the highway in the short term, but they also respond to a vision of the future that excludes fishers. There is a need to include fishers in re-imagining what long-term climate futures should look like. So now I am planning some community-engaged research in Kerala that will be less reactive and more open-ended and imaginative. My love of stories is part of this. I’d like to collaborate with members of the fishing community, and we have been discussing the possibility of writing speculative fiction together. The project itself only exists in our imaginations for now, so I won’t say too much. But stay tuned, I guess, and thanks again for engaging the book.

Work Cited

Ahmann, Chloe
2019     “Waste to Energy: Garbage Prospects and Subjunctive Politics in Late-Industrial Baltimore.” American Ethnologist 46(3): 328–342.

Du Bois, John W.
2007     “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Robert Englebretson, ed. Pp. 139–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Elyachar, Julia
2010     “Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of Empowerment in Cairo.” American Ethnologist 37(3): 452–464.

Laidlaw, James
2002     “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311–332.

Levi-Strauss, Claude
1963     Structural Anthropology. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, trans. New York: Basic Books.

Zigon, Jarrett
2007     “Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities.” Anthropological Theory 7: 131–50.

Zuckerman, Charles H. P., and John Mathias
2022     “The Limits of Bodies: Gatherings and the Problem of Collective Presence.” American Anthropologist 124: 345–357.