CaMP Anthropology

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/sovereign-attachments/paper

Drew Kerr: I’m so excited you’ve taken this time to discuss Sovereign Attachments! It sits as one among, now, a number of urgent book-length projects you’ve produced not just about Muslimness (in South Asia), but incisively about political subjectivity, global Islam, and gender. Can you place this book for us within your range of projects — where did this project start for you and where has it led you?

Shenila Khoja-Moolji:  My work has generally been attentive to the interplay of gender and power in the lives of Muslims in Pakistan as well as in the North American diaspora. This interest has in turn led me to study discourses of education, national security, and human rights, to illuminate how these multiple discourses are constitutive of gendered and racialized subjectivities. The idea for Sovereign Attachments emerged as I was wrapping up my first book, on women’s education, which had raised questions about state power and gender that I realized I wanted to examine further.

My first book, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, responded to what I noticed as a convergence on the figure of the girl in International Development policy and practice. We can find numerous campaigns that portray girls in the Global South as threatened by poverty, disease, and terrorism—and as containing the potential to resolve these problems. These campaigns often present education as the primary social practice that can enable girls to reshape and reinvent themselves, often into productive workers. The argument is that if girls go to school, they will delay marriage, delay childbearing, enter the labor force, contribute to the national GDP, and by doing all of the above they will pull themselves and their families out of poverty. In previous work, I had written  that the burden of development and ending poverty was being shifted onto black and brown girls, without due consideration of the reality that poverty is political and is an effect—not only a cause—of historical relations.  Girls were being called on to reshape themselves into flexible labor for the neoliberal economy, but without significant accompanying critique of the capitalist and racist exploitation and extraction that had originally produced the dispossession of these girls and their families. 

Since I was then concerned about Muslim girls in South Asia, I also investigated the kind of girlhood being portrayed as desirable. I noticed that models of “successful girlhood” were often premised on white, middle-class sensibilities; girls who were prevented by structural disadvantages from enacting this form of girlhood risked incurring the label of “failed” girlhood. In the American context, girls threatened by failed girlhood are often called “at-risk”; when NGO staff see them in a Pakistani context, they identify them as “traditional/backward/oppressed” girls. Though Western NGOs and aid agencies have played a significant role in creating this figure of the oppressed or backward girl, she is not constrained to the world of international development. She travels to national security discourses and there is made to tell a particular story about Islam and Pakistani society: in this story, Muslims are presented as uniquely oppressive, out-of-time, and in turn justify imperialist interventions. I wrote extensively about these practices of racialization (rereading/coding as failure any departure from white middle-class educational norms) and the related phenomenon of casting Muslims as impure or uncivilized. But as I did this research into contemporary framings of Muslim girls’ education, I was reminded that this yearning after the figure of the educated girl is not a new phenomenon. We find similar writings about Musalman women’s education in colonial India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. British administrators, Christian missionaries, and also Muslim social reformers—albeit for different reasons—claimed that education would save, civilize, or reform native women. In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, I had thus decided to track these myriad articulations of the educated Muslim girl from the turn of the twentieth century, considering this figure as a discursive space within which multiple actors—from religious and national elites to international development organizations—advance constructions of ideal girlhood, and at the same time constructions of class relations and national and religious subjectivities.

Over the course of that earlier book project, I had become increasingly concerned with the narrow figurations of women—not only of girls, and not only in respect to education—that were circulating in Pakistani public culture. In writing Sovereign Attachments, I wanted to understand how and why—whether or not educational change happens—women’s roles in Pakistan remain so persistently circumscribed. Since the state is such a powerful institution, I decided to pay attention to the state’s role in sustaining in public culture certain ideations of gender. While previous studies on the interrelationship of gender and state had focused on the laws that affected Pakistani women’s lives, in Sovereign Attachments I was more interested in the cultural and affective modes that revealed and shaped gender hierarchies. I had noticed how the state often mobilized kinship feelings and gendered figurations to legitimize its violence and cultivate consent for its actions, and I wanted to examine this practice more closely. But I also saw gendered imagery mobilized by those who were contesting statist authority. These are some dynamics that I wanted to explore.

Drew Kerr: Sovereign Attachments deftly situates us amid the discursive battles between the state and the Taliban in Pakistan. Attending to recent decades, you consider autobiographies by heads of state, a range of images, videos, songs, didactic magazine and newspaper articles, poems, anonymous women’s letters (maybe written by women), and op-eds in English and Urdu from both the government and the Taliban to rethink sovereignty. It becomes abundantly clear in the book that these particular technologies of mediation and text-artifacts comprise a contentious mediascape of identity and nationhood. To get us into the book, can you walk us through what opens up about the political and moral worlds of sovereignty and masculinity in Pakistan, and generally, by looking at the types of materials you do? 

Shenila Khoja-Moolji: My entry into the book is the 2014 Taliban attack on an Army Public School in Peshawar, in which 132 children, and nine teachers and staff, were killed. In the weeks that followed, I noticed an uptick in media productions—music videos and magazine articles, in particular—by both the Pakistani army and the Taliban. Each blamed the other for the attack. The army released music videos labeling the Taliban as “the coward enemy,” while the Taliban mimicked the same genre, even the same melody, to mock the army for being corrupt, as each sought to influence public opinion. Importantly, both the state and the Taliban mobilized Islam, gender, and emotion as they sought public support for their respective political claims. I therefore decided that Sovereign Attachments would examine public cultural articulations like these, as each side advanced its right to rule and engage in legitimate violence—and advanced these claims specifically via mobilization of gendered images, kinship feeling and heteronormative family life.

In the book I take the reader through a set of gendered figurations that emerged from my close reading and unpack these figurations to understand the constellation of ideas and histories that produce them. Donna Haraway describes figurations as distillations of shared meanings through which we make sense of the world around us. And Imogen Tyler identifies “figurative methodology” as a useful approach “to describe the ways in which at different historical and cultural moments specific ‘social types’ become overdetermined and are publicly imagined (are figured) in excessive, distorted, and caricatured ways.^” By unpacking figurations and following their social and political work, we can discover the terms, registers, and affects through which sovereign attachments—that is, affective attachments to entities claiming state authority—develop in Pakistani public culture. In the dyadic relationship between the Pakistani state and the Taliban, we notice how scripts of gender and Muslimness (or competing notions of normative Islam) become the very means through which sovereignty is performatively iterated. For instance, when the Taliban explain their project as reinstituting khilafat, they are seeking the loyalty of a Muslim observer by harnessing affect that has accumulated over time in the idea of a Muslim dominion. 

Drew Kerr: Your proposed concept of Islamo-masculinity signals a specific (type of) battleground between the Pakistani state and the Taliban, which intersects the performativity and discourses of a few key forms. The sovereign, sovereignty, religious authenticity, intimacy and care (through terms of kinship), violence, and gender all become energized as affective anchors for reading and viewing publics. Could you say more here about how the circulation of such cultural forms serves to interpellate, recruit, and shape specific political attachments and general sense-making? What might that invite us to think about when studying publics broadly?

Shenila Khoja-Moolji: I propose that state and non-state actors intensify relationships of sovereignty in the context of Pakistan by performing normative masculinity and Muslimness. I name this melding: Islamo-masculinity. Islamo-masculinity permits performers to mobilize both the privilege of normative masculinity and that of normative Islam, while demarcating aberrant masculinities. It relies on particular figurations of femininities—daughters in danger or the mourning mother, for instance—in order to become relationally legible. It also interlinks with discourses of heteronormativity and modernity. Islamo-masculinity then does things; it mediates the relationships of sovereignty that exist between claimants and attentive publics, between the individual and the collective. It is how we, the public, become attached to power and give consent to its exercise. 

Drew Kerr: I’m repeatedly struck by the rich ways you develop the dyadic tensions across a number of cultural figurations (for example, soldier/militant, the people’s daughter/wayward sister, mourning/melancholic mother). Far from reducing the conflict of categories to static dominations of either-or, you reveal the really entrenched dialectical maneuvers and iterative negotiations at play across real actors of and imaginations of the state, Taliban, and the people (mothers!). The book structure itself also brings to life a special type of dyad through Part 1 and Part 2. Can you say more about the ways dyads came to life in your research and how the two parts of the book operate in concert with each other, contributing to the overall project?

Shenila Khoja-Moolji: I examine a range of cultural productions, including musicals, magazines, social media, art, and memoirs, to draw out recurring figurations—such as valiant soldier, perverse terrorist, dutiful daughter, and mourning mother—which show how claimants to sovereignty hope to convince their audience by mobilizing gender, Islam, and kinship. Specific figures I examine in the first part include the soldier, the terrorist, the state sovereign. I show that sovereignty is a relationship, an attachment to power that has to be cultivated, and emotions, collective memories, understandings of normative Islam, performances of piety, and masculinity all play a role in how this relationship is established.

There is, however, also an indeterminacy in sovereign attachments that leaves room for the emergence of alternate politics. I show such forms of relationships in Part II through the figures of the unruly daughter and the melancholic mother, for example, who refuse statist prescriptions. The melancholic mother, for instance, rebuffs the memorialization of her dead son through the moniker of “shahid” (martyr). The book thus shows the simultaneity of attachment/consent to power and detachment/resistive politics.

Drew Kerr: While contests of sovereignty in Pakistan sit squarely at the heart of the book, this is very much a story about cultural texts and their publics, too. Who do you envision as your book’s publics and what would you want them to do with it? Or perhaps a slightly tangential way I might ask this: how would you locate this book in relation to the cultural productions it engages? 

Shenila Khoja-Moolji: My hope is that the performances of sovereignty that I consider in the book can help us understand how inequalities—religious, gendered, ethnic—are reproduced. The lifeworlds that I have traced, however, are not a given. So ultimately, students of gender, Islam, and South Asian studies may read the book to think critically not only about how we become invested in power but also how to create different patternings and arrangements of the world.

References

Donna Haraway. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge: p. 23

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2015. “Reading Malala: (De)(Re)Territorialization of Muslim Collectivities.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35(3): 539–56.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2015. “Suturing together Girls and Education: An investigation into the Social (Re)Production of Girls’ Education as a Hegemonic Ideology,” Journal of Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education 9(2): 87-107.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2016. “Doing the ‘work of hearing’: Girls’ Voices in Transnational Educational Development Campaigns,” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 46(5): 745-763.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2017. “The Making of Humans and Their Others in and through Transnational Human Rights Advocacy: Exploring the Cases of Mukhtar Mai and Malala Yousafzai.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42(2): 377–402.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji. 2018. Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia. Oakland: University of California Press.

Imogen Tyler. 2008. “Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain,” Feminist Media Studies 8(1): 18.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo214237970.html

Interview by Bonnie Urciuoli

Bonnie Urciuoli:  What arguments in your book seem relevant right after Trump’s victory on November 5^th?

Ilana Gershon: We just had an election that, for half the country, was framed as an election about whether the United States should be a democracy governed by the rule of law.  At this moment, for those on the opposition, a vote for Trump is so clearly a vote for authoritarianism, for fascism, that many are genuinely baffled.  Why don’t their fellow citizens want to protect democracy? And many pundits are answering demographically, categorizing people more as individuals than as members of different interacting communities by focusing on race, income levels, geography, and so on.   We aren’t asking anthropological questions, such as where people learn their political imagination and attitudes to the common good. And when they exercise their political imagination in daily life, what are their lived experiences of democracy and autocracy? 

My book explores these questions ethnographically.   Conceptually, I begin with Tocqueville, pointing out that he was writing at a time in the early 19^th century when US-Americans were actively involved in civic associations. In his book Democracy in America, he suggested that Americans learned how to think of the common good and how to make decisions for the betterment of a community instead of self-interest.  And remember, Tocqueville was writing almost two hundred years ago.  Sociologists such as Robert Putnam and Nina Eliasoph have argued that Americans don’t participate in civil society organizations anymore.  So where do they learn how to govern and be governed these days?  Where do they learn their political imagination?  In this book, I argue that it is the workplace.

And, of course, that immediately should be an issue of concern – after all, most workplaces are geared towards making a profit, and as Karen Ho illustrates so beautifully in Liquidated, neoliberal workplaces are now structured around the fact that most major corporate decisions are made only with shareholders’ interests in mind.  And many many people don’t actually like their jobs,  often this is because of how they are governed in workplaces.  In addition, most workplaces lie on a continuum between democracy and autocracy, and not cohesively so.  Some decisions in a workplace are made more democratically than others, and it often depends on your structural role in the workplace.  So, some people can experience the same workplace as far more authoritarian than their co-workers do.

When I started talking about how instead of “it’s the economy, stupid,” maybe “it’s the workplace, stupid” with a friend just after the election, she immediately pointed out that she always feels like her dean is gaslighting her when she is told how democratic her academic department is.  And if that is your practical experience of democracy – that you are constantly being told that an institution you belong to is a democracy when you feel as if you have absolutely no say in how the institution is run and no ability to advocate effectively for change, then why would you care when a political party insists that your democracy is at stake?

Bonnie Urciuoli: Your book is about the workplace as a site of private government.  But it is also about the pandemic,  in what ways is this a book about Covid-19?

Ilana Gershon: This is actually how my book builds most directly on Whorf’s insights and other linguistic anthropologists’ fundamental theoretical presuppositions.  When workplaces started having to respond to COVID-19, all of a sudden, many routinized practices that were taken for granted had to be rethought and recast.  So many decisions upended the everyday ways in which Things Are Done. After years of everyone in the office Monday through Friday, when half of a company comes to work on Mondays and Wednesdays and alternative Fridays, and the other half on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the other Fridays, all sorts of established patterns are undercut.  And small changes in how Things Are Done have a way of cascading so that you aren’t just making one new decision; you are making many new decisions due to a rule like “everyone must stand six feet apart.” It is a moment in which established repertoires are upended, and people become very conscious of how decisions are made in their workplaces.  It was a grand ethnomethodological experiment.   When I began interviewing people about working in person during the early months of the pandemic, I learned that grand ethnomethodological experiments inspire workers to become very savvy and reflexive social analysts of their situations.  It was a dreadful time to live through but a very good time to start asking people to discuss how they felt about the ins and outs of decision-making, especially when these decisions often pitted their financial security against their well-being.  It was a moment in which I began to think a lot about the politics of coordination.  Many of us discovered we were living alongside people who might have very different ideas of risk and what we owe others in a crisis than we do, and analyzing this problem through the lens of governing felt very productive.

Bonnie Urciuoli: When you were writing the book, you told me that you felt a little strange channeling David Schneider as much as you were.  In what ways were you channeling David Schneider?

Ilana Gershon: I really did not expect to return with such a vengeance to David Schneider’s instincts for the pithy and often reductive insight into shared cultural presuppositions, and certainly not in a book about private government and pandemics.  But time and time again, in my over 200 oral history interviews, I kept stumbling across how difficult it was for US Americans to tell each other what to do.  Telling someone else what to do is such a highly charged act in the United States unless you are bound by contract or kinship.  Admittedly, ordering another person to do something may even become contentious within families and in contractual situations – mothers-in-law don’t always have the easiest of times telling their daughters-in-law what to do, and middle managers sometimes step very lightly as they lead a team.  In fact, when I mentioned to my own mother-in-law that this was one of the findings in my interviews, she said that she never tells her children’s spouses what to do.  I so wish I had a better poker face; I might even have snorted.  Many of my interviewees’ social strategies wouldn’t have been necessary if telling someone else what to do wasn’t such a highly charged act in the United States.  This realization about contract and kinship felt very much like something that David Schneider might have pointed out.  Towards the end of my workplace interviews, I even began to worry that I was planning to say this in talks in front of anthropologists without any material on how families were responding to the same types of pandemic dilemmas that workplaces were confronting.  So, I hired Anna Eisenstein, an excellent postdoc and superb ethnographer, and I am currently working through the many pandemic family interviews she conducted.  In a few months, I may even have an answer if anyone asks me about patterns in US-American family responses.

Bonnie Urciuoi: If it is so charged and difficult to tell people what to do in the US or to accept what others instruct us to do, why do people want a leader who tells them what to do? Could you clarify for readers?

Ilana Gershon: Such a good question! Highly charged social acts often are the bedrock of fantasy and desire.  I don’t think Trump supporters imagine he is going to tell them what to do.  And because telling someone else what to do is so highly charged, many people probably long to do this, and feel bound by social expectations.  Here I am agreeing with a recent Ezra Klein column, that much of Trump’s appeal is that he is disinhibited in a way that his supporters long to be.  It is probably very satisfying to watch someone tell others what to do, especially when you find those others infuriating, or representative of organizations or systems that you find insufferable.  They are not voting for their boss, they are voting for someone who will be other people’s bosses, and their representative.  

If you look at Trump’s speeches, he constantly refers to telling others what to do and being told what to do and refusing to obey.  My hunch is that the only thing he talks about more is how efficacious he is and will be.  I think that the way Trump engages with this highly charged speech act is crucial to his appeal.

Bonnie Urciuoli: You only mention Trump in the beginning and end of the book, but in listening to you talk, one gets the sense Trump shaped the book’s largest questions. In what ways does Trump haunt this book?

Ilana Gershon: The argument for the book came to me while reading a New Yorker article by Evan Osnos about the January 6^th insurrection.  The next day, I was reading Osnos’ article and noticed that when he talked about what the insurrectionists had told him, they were all interpreting the federal government through the lens of their workplaces.  And a lightbulb went on.

All of my interviews for this book took place before February 2021.  The people I talked to struggled with how hard it was to enforce COVID protocols and often needed to point to some policy or superior when insisting another person follow a COVID protocol. It would have been much easier for them if Trump had simply allowed the United States to have a federal set of pandemic guidelines.  People, for social reasons, needed to be able to point to a common overarching authority to ask others to mask, socially distance, and so on.  If it wasn’t for Trump, it might have taken me much longer to notice how highly charged a speech act it is to tell someone else what to do.

The last thing I want to mention is that in my conclusion, I write about how I now understand Trump’s appeal – that they might enjoy how he undercuts contracts and refuses to make decisions by committees.  These are the ubiquitous classic liberal forms that shaped how betrayed people felt during the pandemic.  Why people find contracts oppressive and duplicitous these days might be all too clear.  So many people feel forced into contracts, unable to negotiate the terms at the outset, and yet strictly bound by these terms.  And now that so many people are working in fissured workplaces with independent contractors working alongside full-time employees, people have ample evidence at work of how crucial contracts are for fashioning workplace hierarchies.   But why do people dislike committee decisions so much? For that, it might be helpful to turn to fantasy author Terry Pratchett’s account of committees in Making Money.  Lord Vetinari, the dictator of a city-state in the Discworld, muses: “He was a great believer in letting a thousand voices be heard, because this meant that all he actually needed to do was listen only to the ones that had anything useful to say, ‘useful’ in this case being defined in the classic civil-service way as ‘inclining to my point of view.’ In his experience, it was a number generally smaller than ten. The people who wanted a thousand, etc., really meant that they wanted their own voice to be heard while the other nine hundred and ninety-nine were ignored, and for this purpose, the gods had invented the committee. Vetinari was very good at committees, especially when Drumknott [Lord Vetinari’s chief clerk] took the minutes. What the Iron Maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive, far less messy, considerably more efficient, and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the Iron Maiden.” Pratchett aside, committees often function as a black hole of decision-making for people not actually on the committee.  People often don’t get clear enough explanations for why a committee made the decisions it did, or even whether their views were addressed in the committee conversation, and so they don’t actually feel that the committee is a moment of representative democracy.   Another instance in which an autocrat who can explain his logic, and change his mind in response to feedback, may seem preferable to a committee that does not.

Bonnie Urciuoli:  Can I close by emphasizing the importance of what, beyond the immediate topics of covid and workplace, your work has to say, in detail, about how people come to share understandings and what organizes those understandings, especially about government as daily acts of governing, but not only about governing.