CaMP Anthropology

Shenila Khoja-Moolji on her book, Sovereign Attachments

November 25th, 2024

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.
Matt Tomlinson on his book, Speaking with the Dead

November 18th, 2024

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/speaking-with-the-dead-an-ethnography-of-extrahuman-experience/

Kristina Wirtz: Congratulations on this lovely book, Matt! It is a fascinating and empathetic account of modern Spiritualist practice, showing the connections between the small congregation you studied in Canberra and wider historical and contemporary circuits connecting Australia, the UK, and the US in particular. It is evident that you wrote this to be a very accessible ethnography, well-situated in the scholarship but avoiding more technical discourse analysis or jargony theoretical discussions typical of ethnographies centered in linguistic anthropology and semiotic theory. Instead, you focus on what non-Spiritualists really want to know: what does it mean to talk to dead people? Why do Spiritualists want to do so, and how do they go about it? Just what makes them confident it is even possible, and how do they (and we) know when or if they are actually successful? So I want to open our discussion by asking about your intentions in writing this book: who do you envision as its primary audience(s)? How does the book fit into the broader array of publications you are producing out of this project? What did the process of writing the book clarify for you?

Matt Tomlinson: Thank you, Kristina. I appreciate your description of the book. Yes, I wrote it with the hope of reaching an educated general audience interested in religious and spiritual experience. Although my core interest is the way in which dialogism works in ritual, many people pose the questions you mention: Why might one try to speak with dead people, anyway? How, specifically, would you go about doing it? How would you know you’re doing a good job, and—especially—do you really believe this? This book is written to address those questions. I’ve got a number of articles recently published and forthcoming which address theoretical aspects of the project in a more scholarly way. And, I must mention that the research project is a collaboration with a sociologist, Andrew Singleton, and he and I have a book coming out late this year with Manchester University Press which combines sociological and anthropological analysis of Spiritualism’s development in Australia.

Kristina Wirtz: I am looking forward to reading your forthcoming co-authored book, too. Studying the religious experiences of others inevitably seems to lead us into a thicket of questions about belief. In your introduction, you address the tension between skeptical outsider ethnographer and believing ethnographic subjects by recasting belief/non-belief as an “imbalance of certainties.” Your role as ethnographer, you suggest, is to seek a balance between open-mindedness, skepticism, and embracing of a worldview different than your own. One way you did this during your research was by undertaking training in mediumship, which you describe in the book. The reader comes away with a strong impression of your deep empathy with the Spiritualist project and your vulnerability in recounting your own efforts to be a good medium and a good audience member, despite your skepticism. You share insights about mediumship as emotional connection, fluid like music, and also fleeting like dreaming. What was it like to train as a medium?

Matt Tomlinson: Training as a medium is one of the most fun but demanding things I’ve experienced during any research project. I hope readers enjoy the descriptions of what it’s like to suspend your conscious thought while awaiting signs that might pop into your brain and body, then trying to develop dialogues with people about who these signs could be coming from. What the training—and hundreds of hours watching mediums at services—taught me above all was what a complex skill mediumship is. Some people are much better at it than others. I think one can evaluate mediums’ methods and skills while suspending judgment on ultimate metaphysical claims.

Kristina Wirtz: Speaking of metaphysical claims, I appreciated your argument that the great struggle of Spiritualism does not pit good versus evil but skepticism versus proof in what counts as evidence. It seems that being a good Spiritualist involves maintaining a degree of epistemological uncertainty, even amid the ontological certainty that the living and dead can communicate. As you say in chapter 7, exploring the life stories of mediums, “Spiritualism is meant to help people discover the truth individually rather than accept it by fiat” (p. 170). What strikes me about this focus on what is convincing is how it refigures the most skeptical outsider–even the anthropologist–as participating in a fundamentally religious process of evaluating evidence of the dead. This reminds me of Susan Harding’s discussion of something similar in her ethnographic research with American fundamentalist Christians, for whom the ethnographic interview was simply another opportunity to testify and potentially bring their interlocutor closer to Jesus. In the course of your research, you really joined the core of this small community, in not just attending services and trainings and getting to know people, but becoming part of the Canberra Spiritualist Association’s governing committee for three years. So what insights can you share about epistemological vulnerability as ethnographic method? About shifting toward understanding what counts as convincing evidence and empathetic connection, versus the possibilities of fraud and failure you also discuss? Did your own balance at all shift?

Matt Tomlinson: That’s a great set of questions. The understanding of mediumship as evidence-gathering means a Spiritualist congregation is especially welcoming to ethnographers. In a Spiritualist service, it’s good to have curious, skeptical people show up, because mediums’ task is to persuade listeners that they are really in touch with the spirit world.

As I mentioned, mediumship is a skill. Imagine standing in front of a roomful of strangers, letting your mind go blank so your own expectations don’t intrude, and then trying to speak meaningfully with people about their late loved ones. It’s much harder than it might sound! I was fascinated by moments of failure, in which the medium simply can’t get listeners to recognize the person in the spirit world they are describing—and, although I did not perform at public services, I experienced this failure often enough myself when learning mediumship in workshops and classes. As you can guess, it’s awkward and uncomfortable. So I gained appreciation of the social and verbal skills of mediums who make difficult work seem easy and natural.

But what shifted most for me was my appreciation of the work of audience members. When a medium is struggling to connect with audience members, you might hear her offer a few details that sound like your late grandmother: She loved swimming; she sewed clothes expertly; she had daughters, no sons. But the medium also says things that don’t fit: for example, the woman whom this medium senses loved traveling, but your grandmother was a homebody. Some audience members will say yes to most details (they’re the “body snatchers” or “grabbers”); others are steely skeptics, and will insist on finely tuned accuracy in all areas. I tried to sit in the middle, working conversationally with mediums in an open-minded way but not hesitating to say “no” when a statement was wrong. I should add that it can be emotionally difficult to say no. Not only are you contributing to the medium’s struggles, but you are saying, in effect, I wish you were in touch with my grandmother, but that’s clearly not her, and you feel her absence more keenly. Over time, I came to rebalance the emphasis I originally placed on mediums’ skill. Although I discuss mediums’ skills at length in the book, I also wanted to give a full discussion of listeners’ skill: on how being a good audience member in Spiritualism is also difficult work.

Kristina Wirtz: I was captivated by your account of the effort mediums and audiences put into mediating connections with the dead. I definitely came away with an understanding of Spiritualist mediumship as an experience of surrender to receiving and passing along images and messages that might connect the “humdrum” details of a past ordinary life–someone’s deceased relative’s love of cauliflower with cheese sauce–to “the highest of existential claims” about their persistence as a dead person speaking through the medium to their living loved ones (p. 181). In one beautiful phrase, you describe mediumship as an attempt to “link the intimate with the ultimate.” You also emphasize how mundane the Spiritualist services and events are, from the rented out rooms and halls and metal folding chairs to the talk itself. That got me wondering about drama, despite all the practices that seem to encourage anti-drama, including what you describe as “cultivated normalcy,” sensitivity, and “chat not chant.” And yet, you also describe very moving moments when a medium and audience member really connect over a particular moment of contact with the dead.

In the book and in some of your other publications, your metaphor for mediumship is as conversational hinges conducting one conversation with the invisible and inaudible dead and another relaying information to the audience. You also explore the metapragmatic focus on how to hear mediums as an audience member, and what constitutes appropriate audience behavior (like not being a “body snatcher!”). And of course, your interviewees have plenty to say on the character of spirit communications–for example, that “people in the spirit world do not communicate TOO directly with us.”

So, in what ways do you think it is useful to approach Spiritualist mediumship talk as ritual language, given its poetics of “chat not chant?” Or would you make the case that Spiritualists espouse a semiotic ideology of anti-ritual language–perhaps in relation to similar semiotic ideologies prevalent in both Protestant Christian and secular scientific discourse?

Matt Tomlinson: These are two more really good questions, because (to begin with the second one) mediums’ speech is ritualized, but in a way that deemphasizes formality—it does not call attention to itself as ritual speech. The style is meant to be like everyday speech. Much of a medium’s speech is not too different from the way you might ask a friend about a late relative of theirs, little questions all tending toward the overarching one: “what was she really like?” Yet this casual questioning is designed to affirm an extrahuman connection. It leads, ideally, to an affirmation that the listener knows who the medium is in contact with, and agreement that this is someone they knew who is now deceased. Some kinds of evidence are considered particularly strong, like names, or clinchers—weird details that no one could guess. (If your grandmother owned a purple stuffed alligator and the medium says, “I’m seeing a purple stuffed alligator,” that’s a clincher.) And the interaction needs to conclude with a message from the spirit world, usually a gentle one of love and encouragement.

Because you’ve done wonderful work on unintelligible speech in ritual, Kristina, I should mention that unintelligibility is policed strongly in Spiritualism. No unknown languages or secret words are revealed or discussed. When inexplicable details remain unresolved, the medium often says they will be figured out later. For example, if a listener has accepted that the medium is in contact with the spirit of their grandmother, yet the medium has offered a detail which doesn’t fit—for example, that she “loved visiting Italy,” although she never did—the medium will often tell the listener to ask family members about it after the service. It’s expected that other people will remember, and help the listener make sense of the information later on.

The mediums I have worked with are all honest and committed. They believe they are truly in touch with the spirit world and are keen to prove it, so when there is a failure in performance, and nobody can recognize the identity of the person whom the medium is bringing through from the spirit world, the usual explanation—from mediums and audiences alike—is that there really was a spirit communicating, but for some reason the conversation did not work out.

About drama, this is another balancing act. There are laughter and tears at times, for sure. One thing that surprised me was how some mediums generate more laughter than tears. As you know, the fourth chapter in the book describes a British medium whose work I found astonishing, especially for how skillfully she kept the audience happily engaged during a reading for a bereaved mother. Yet, as you also mention, the mundanity is something I pay a lot of attention to. Many services have no laughter and no tears. The emphasis is on evidence-gathering, not emotional expression.

Kristina Wirtz: I’m so glad you used the term “extrahuman” in your response, because I wanted to ask you about what this term means in the context of Spiritualism. I should note that it is in your book’s title but not discussed in the text itself. Certainly, the term (especially in the phrase “extrahuman experience”) resonates with “extrasensory perception,” as well as with scholarly terms of art such as the “not human” and “more than human.” All of these concepts hover around some notion of the extraordinary. How does this square with the mundane and informal quality of speaking with the dead and with the emphasis on stabilizing bonds of kinship across the barrier posed by death? As I understand your account, the dead remain human in every meaningful way, and their relationships with their living kin remain rooted in the ordinary details of individual lives. You expressly reject “haunting” in your introduction as not applicable. It seems the extraordinary effort is behind the scenes so to speak, in the arduous training in mediumship. So what work do you want to do with “extrahuman?”

Matt Tomlinson: In Spiritualist understandings, the spirits with whom mediums speak are fully human; they just happen to live on the astral plane. I like how the term “extrahuman” keeps the focus on humanity rather than suggesting humans-plus-others. You’re right, though: Spiritualist mediums insist on both the ordinariness of spiritual existence and the need for effortful training in mediumship. The “extra” also points to the broader social context in which Spiritualism operates. Many Australian, American and British citizens know about the psychics and mediums next door, but regard them skeptically.

Kristina Wirtz: I have a more fanciful final question, if I may, because there are so many representations of Spiritualism in literature and pop culture, and these are often so sensationalistic and, well, wrong. What’s your favorite fictional depiction of Spiritualism and its principles? Were there any novels that members of the Canberra Spiritualist Association liked for their depictions of Spiritualist principles? I have my own faves, so I’ll go first…I’m not sure whether George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) counts, invoking Buddhist theology as it does. It so beautifully delves into the unfinished business of living and especially love of our families that surely animates the dead. For its depiction of more orthodox Anglophone Spiritualism, my choice would be Summerland (2018), by Hannu Rajaniemi, which reimagines the late 1930s build up to war in Great Britain in a world where the world powers have learned to work with and extend their control into the afterlife, called summerland. In the novel, there is a similar blend of the mundane and mystical and emphasis on human connection and perfectability in the continuities (even of government bureaucracies) across the membrane separating life from death. Your turn!

Matt Tomlinson: This is a fun question to conclude with. I haven’t read Saunders or Rajaniemi yet. As I was writing articles and chapters a few years ago, an anonymous reviewer recommended Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black, which I enjoyed very much. The protagonist is a medium, Alison Hart, who is bedeviled by her spirit guide. The relationship between Alison and her guide is nothing like the relationships of the mediums I know, but Mantel does a fantastic job of conveying how mediums describe their work. I also want to mention a work with less visibility, Lisa Lang’s Utopian Man, an evocative novel set in late nineteenth-century Melbourne. It’s not focused on Spiritualism, but Eliza, the wife of the main character, is curious and skeptical about mediums and ultimately sees their work as therapeutic. This also has to be one of the only novels ever to mention the long-running Melbourne Spiritualist periodical Harbinger of Light!

I don’t know any movies that present mediumship the way it’s actually practiced, although I should mention that former leaders of the Canberra Spiritualist Association have commented positively on Robin Williams’ What Dreams May Come, which is full of afterlife scenes resonant with some Spiritualist philosophy.
Sonya Pritzker on her book, Learning to Love

November 13th, 2024

https://press.umich.edu/Books/L/Learning-to-Love2

Jiarui Sun:. Throughout the book you have emphasized that New Life, the psychospiritual self-development program you studied, did not “have any intentions of politicizing or otherwise developing participants’ social or political engagement” but you believe the participants’ experiences nevertheless open up possibilities to show how existing systems of power may potentially be interrogated or reproduced. What led you to such a seemingly apolitical site when you are clearly very much concerned with issues of social justice and unequal power dynamics in China?

Sonya Pritzker: New Life is not an explicitly politicized space, yet my observation is that—for some participants at least—the kinds of group exercises and self-directed interrogations conducted there generate provocative encounters and experiences that afford reconsideration of hegemonic systems and structures. My short answer for why I chose such an apolitical site: I subscribe to the notion that there is absolutely nothing that is not political.

The longer answer relates to the way that directionality works in ethnography. It is often imagined that we formulate our interests as intentions that we write up in proposals to conduct research in sites where we imagine we will find communities and practices corresponding to those interests and commitments. Then we go do research and write it all up in a process that further bolsters our interests and makes us experts in the topic. But in reality, it also often moves in the other direction: our research in certain sites and with certain communities and individuals moves us to discover and/or more deeply refine our interests and value commitments. That is certainly what happened with this research: it was, more than anything, the participants who pushed me to reframe my analysis in terms of the possibility that self-development work, especially in a group context, invites an interrogation of systems of power as they exist within the self. Time was also a factor. A lot happened between 2014, when I began the research, and the publication of the book in 2024, including multiple collaborations with colleagues in anthropology and related fields and the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic in particular pushed me to consider the intimacy of the political at a whole new scale. The final book manuscript was also deeply influenced by my current research on the Living Justice Project, which began in 2020 and which focuses on the theories and practices in “embodied social justice”(see, for example, brown 2017, Johnson 2018, Haines 2019, Menakem 2017, Hemphill 2024). All of these directly influenced the final shape that the book took on

Jiarui Sun: In the book, you mention that many of the sentiments and “affect” you discussed are not explicitly articulated–either because they cannot be said (that is, as public secrets) or they are too ambiguous. What, then, were/are your strategies when it comes to ethnographically identifying and analyzing affect and what do you think makes it important for ethnographers to pay attention to such subtle, implicit, yet nevertheless deeply social experiences?

Sonya Pritzker: My strategy for studying affect is firmly based in the perspective, in linguistic anthropology, that affect/emotion is not emergent in interaction. People may or may not use words, but interaction always includes tone of voice, gesture, prosody, rhythm, and embodied engagement with the world of object and non-human others, to name just a few (see for example Nakassis 2016, Goodwin 2018, Pritzker 2020). It is not therefore terribly challenging to study emotion or affect, especially if you are studying interaction. We just need to resist the temptation to identify specific emotions as they are expressed by specific individuals. Rather, we can study affect by looking at how interactants respond to one another over a series of turns. We can also see it in the various stances that speakers adopt (affective, epistemic, and so on), which index their felt/affective experiences in and of the world. In my opinion, it is always deeply important for ethnographers to attend to, because no matter what we are researching, people’s bodies are always affected by others and by conditions in the world.

Jiarui Sun: Throughout the book, you present group therapeutic activities and interviews as scale-making processes, and you introduce two analytical terms, scalar intimacy and scalar inquiry. I understand scalar intimacy as the way in which people scale themselves in relation to the world around them, and scalar inquiry being how they interrogate dominant structures. If this reading is correct, can you talk about how these two concepts constitute a “paired process”?

Sonya Pritzker: Theoretically, scalar intimacy and scalar inquiry could be said to constitute a paired set. Scalar intimacy, however, is more fundamental. It is happening all the time. We don’t all run around talking about how we use chronotopes and other discourse features to scale ourselves in relation to dominant ideologies and structures of power. But it is certainly something we do. By we, I mean that all humans engage in the agentive, interactive, and embodied project of situating (or trying to situate) ourselves in relation to other people, other living beings, and existing ideologies.

I would hesitate to say the same thing about the kind of questioning involved in scalar inquiry, which depends on a lot of different factors like the system you live in/under, your temperament and putatively natural or cultivated ability to tolerate uncertainty, the media you are exposed to, other things happening in the world, and on and on. But scalar inquiry often occurs when one’s world is, for whatever reason, turned upside down. Personal and/or collective challenges here force us to reconsider the way we situate ourselves in the world, which can generate a lot of anxiety and discomfort. Many seek out alternative frameworks to re-situate themselves in the world. Scalar inquiry, however, has more to do with staying with the questions and engaging in a sustained, collaborative, and emergent kind of inquiry that refuses new forms of certainty, at least to some extent, such that we remain open to possibilities that do not yet exist.

Jiarui Sun: I’m curious to hear, how do you make sense of the role your positionality plays in your interlocutors’ scalar work? Since anthropologists are also scale-makers, what do you think is a good way to articulate our own scale-making work in relation to our interlocutors’?

Sonya Pritzker: I certainly did my very best to continually reflect upon my own positionality throughout this research as well as in writing it up. My position as a cultural outsider, for example, often afforded more openness than if a participant was talking to close friends or family. My position as a perceived insider with regards to the realms of psychospiritual knowledge folks were engaging with, on the other hand, may have moved participants to present themselves to me as knowledgeable, open-minded people who understood the material and shared a lot of the same views on the world that I had–or that I was imagined to have.

Both of these are scaling processes, which are always relationally situated. Both scalar intimacy and scalar inquiry are enacted as (re)positionings of self in relation to both co-present and non-co-present interlocutors: in any conversation that is oriented to getting along, we work to establish a kind of common ground as we continuously scale and situate ourselves in a shared world, even when we have different backgrounds and, in some cases, different moral commitments and priorities. A whole different set of moves arises in conversations where we orient to not getting along, of course (certainly sometimes necessary) or in conversations where we come to recognize that the way we situate ourselves is incompatible in some kind of fundamental way. Thankfully, this research consisted mostly of opportunities for mutual scaling that afforded a lot of intimacy and vulnerability. So no matter if I was perceived as an outsider or an insider, this kind of scaling work often made it possible for me, along with my interlocutors, to position ourselves as colleagues or friends who were focusing, together, on a challenging experience or difficult issue that one of us was experiencing or had experienced. It positioned us, in this sense, as equals who, despite having different backgrounds, could connect more vulnerably.

All of this arguably speaks to a broader methodological understanding, in linguistic anthropology, of the ethnographic interview as an interaction rather than a transaction (see, for example, Briggs 1984, Perrino 2022), as opposed to the standard (western) model for interviews where the interviewer is positioned as the collector of the interviewee’s pre-existing and enduring ideas, experiences, and attitudes. That isn’t to suggest that we shouldn’t do our best to focus, in ethnographic interviews, on investigations of the interviewee’s (rather than our own) experience. To that extent, I think it is important to craft interview questions such that they openly invite interviewees to set their own scales as they respond.

Jiarui Sun: What do you think the experience of Chinese participants of New Life can teach us about the shared conditions of living in, say, capitalism that transcends geo-cultural boundaries?

Sonya Pritzker: I would say that the experience of Chinese participants at New Life offers insight into the basic fact that we are all affected by conditions of oppression, especially in relation to capitalism and patriarchy. Although way this translates into experience may differ, I think there are possibilities for the kind of scalar inquiry I discuss in the book to happen anywhere. Especially in group contexts where there is so much opportunity to begin to understand our own suffering as we witness others. At New Life, of course, there was more homogeneity than we might expect in other settings, both in terms of ethnicity and class and cultural background. I talked a lot throughout the book about how New Life is a Hantopia: rural laborers, Uyghur or Kazakh Chinese citizens or Tibetan Chinese citizens were not in the room. So there wasn’t a lot of grappling with difference, or connection across difference. I think that made it particularly possible for folks to begin engaging in the kind of scalar inquiry I describe throughout the book. In terms of understanding our shared conditions, here are more hurdles conversations across difference. Because no matter how much conditions are shared, people’s experience always differs, especially based on their social location.

Jiarui Sun: In the book, you talked a lot about the family constellation therapy, or in Chinese, jiapai. This practice begins with one focal participant selecting people from the group to embody significant people in their personal history. Those who are selected don’t know the people they are embodying, and they probably don’t even know much about the focal person either. This makes me wonder what makes jiapai so powerful for the focal person? To what extent does this practice require participants sharing some specific kinds of cultural knowledge? And what do you think jiapai teaches us about the politics of similarities and differences?

Sonya Pritzker: I think—and as Whitney Duncan and I discussed in our 2019 article– what makes it so powerful is the lack of interpretation and witnessing ourselves from a perspective outside of ourselves, in the company of others. When you are the focal person and you see someone else crying when they see your past experience, or your mother’s past experience, getting enacted in this constellation, then it indexes to a shared history in which patriarchy has created conditions for women that are burdens passed down to us. All of a sudden, it’s not just your issue, it’s everybody’s problem, and it traces back to history: it’s our problem.

The idea that jiapai can only be conducted among people who are from a similar background is really interesting. I would guide you and other readers back to the section where I talk about cultural components in jiapai. I think in the Chinese context, we have a lot of folks from a similar background, which generates this shared experience that I don’t think prevails when you have participants from a different background. I have been to jiapai or family constellation in the US and I didn’t feel this shared vibe. To be clear, I don’t think there necessarily is an absolute cultural difference. I think it’s more about when you have people from different backgrounds, you have to face questions of not being able to mirror each other in the same ways as we do with people with similar backgrounds. And I think that the way forward for scalar intimacy or scalar inquiry does lie in learning to have these connections across difference.

Jiarui Sun: In the book you talked a lot about the hope and horizon opened up by the psychospiritual practices your interlocutors were engaged in. However, towards the end of it you are honest with your “despair” (267) and “lack of optimism” (268) in the future of the heteronormative, patriarchal, Han-centric Chinese society. Can you say a bit more about the tension between “hope” and “despair” that you observe in your work? And what do you hope this book could do for scholars of contemporary China as well as people living in China in 2024?

Sonya Pritzker: COVID and other events in the world inevitably influenced my choice to end what is arguably a very hopeful book with an emphasis on a lack of hope, even a kind of despair. I was quite intentional with that move, however, for a number of reasons. First, as I say throughout the book, even though I absolutely disagree with what the common anthropological critique that therapeutic self-development is inherently apolitical (that is, that turning inwards towards the self ipso facto means turning away from society/the social or what is positioned, by such critiques, as existing outside of the self), the reverse is not necessarily true either. In other words: even though therapeutic self-development—self-care, self-growth, and so on—especially when carried out in a group setting, can move some participants to consider the social at various scales, that is often not what it is explicitly designed to do. Except in fields, like embodied social justice, where leaders intentionally incorporate a “political education” (Haines 2019) and engage practices designed to foster the cultivation of political consciousness (Friere 2000), it might be said to exist only as a kind of whisper, an indexical field that may or may not be taken up by individual participants. Those individuals who do take it up, moreover, do not necessarily connect with likeminded others in order to engage a broader conversation in society or in order to organize in the kind of collective action that might overturn longstanding systems of power that are unjust and exclusionary (patriarchy, global racial capitalism, Han/white supremacy, and so on).

Second, bringing this argument to China–where collective political action is intensely constrained in a whole host of ways that it is not in the U.S. and Europe—adds another layer (perhaps many layers) of complexity. Even in sites where political participation and protest are encouraged to a greater extent than they are tolerated in China, however, it is far from easy to transform society and there is often a lot of despair and grief when one confronts the seemingly never-ending ways in which injustice prevails. This is not to say that there are not important moments—as sometimes occurred at New Life, and which occurred during the 11-hour Clubhouse conversation between Uyghur and Han citizens described in the conclusion, where the conversation leaps out of the individual into the collective and affords consideration of alternative possible futures. If one is concerned with hope for a just future, however, how much faith can one ultimately place in such extraordinary moments?

Third and finally, I think what it often comes down to is the way that we understand the tension—as you say—between hope and despair—or hope and fear. Are they always opposites? Not necessarily. I am currently working on an article focusing on chronotopes in social justice movements, for example, and without getting into details, much of it grapples with the ways in which mainstream ideologies and practices related to social justice often orient within a (spatio)temporal framework of progress (see, for example, Atchinson 2015, Comer 2023). Here, they also often orient, implicitly or explicitly, to what Michele Moody-Adam’s calls “the standard account of hope” in which “hope is ‘expectant desire’: a stance that combines wanting or desiring something to happen or be true with thinking that it could really happen or be true” (2022: 237). In this framing, hope and despair are absolute opposites, with despair emerging from the belief that our desire (for justice or for anything) cannot ever really happen, that it can and will never be true. She contrasts this, however, with Vaclav Havel’s understanding of hope as “an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed…. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out” (Havel 1990: 181-82). From this perspective, importantly, hope is an orientation towards the good that is not at all opposite from despair. In alignment with this, practitioners of embodied social justice often remap hope in ways that disturb binary notions that pit hope against despair. Here, they suggest that a genuine willingness to confront what is in the present opens one up to a great deal of despair at the same time as it reorients you towards hope as a liberatory practice in the present (see, for example, brown 2017, Hicks Peterson and Khouri 2024). This is precisely the kind of despair/hope integration that I tried to convey in my conclusion.
Ilana Gershon on her book, The Pandemic Workplace

November 11th, 2024

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.
Andrew Brandel on his book, Moving Words

November 4th, 2024

https://utorontopress.com/9781487543686/moving-words/

Setrag Manoukian: Your fantastic book is rich in both stories and concepts–both of Berlin and from Berlin–detouring the reader and anthropology towards many new openings. If I were to pick one thread to start with, it seems to me that Moving Words is telling us to stop rehearsing the trite idea that life and literature are separate, perhaps even incompatible: that either you live or you write. To counter this motto, you provide a rich path across several Berlin scenes and a parallel conversation in the endnotes, arguing instead that life is literature, or rather that there is no point in conducting an ethnography of “texts and contexts.”

Andrew Brandel: I agree; this is the opening gambit and a signal theme of the book –people live (with) literature in all kinds of ways, and it is lived as a component of the real. I am committed to the view that we don’t know ahead of time where or when we might find that something counts as literature. Ethnography, as I understand it, requires an openness to these possibilities. The first artist we meet in the book insists that what matters is what could be the case. He is giving a tour of a well-known street in Berlin, points to an apartment window, and says, perhaps that’s the apartment where Nabokov wrote Mary. In the opening scenes, I juxtapose this statement with another writer who talks about how different ghosts that live in Berlin are compared to those in London (and about the whiteness of those stories). Alongside these two figures, there is Nabokov’s own Berlin writing. (How) Do they share a city? Rather than starting from a definition or from rigid ideas about the places and people for whom literature matters or how it matters, I tried to make a methodological case for staying with possibilities that can’t necessarily be gathered into a single, unified story. We have no choice but to look in every case to see what it means and to whom.

There’s a moment in the middle of the book where a writer with whom I have worked especially closely for several years starts telling me about a character in a novel she’d been writing and who she finds very difficult to live with. I don’t take her to be speaking metaphorically here. Nor is she speaking exclusively about the text she’s writing – the things the character does, or desires, or experiences in the novel. It is in a sincere mood that she tells me that this character insists she eat in certain restaurants, that she buys certain clothes and not others, and that she visits with this person rather than that one. The character irritates her the way people sometimes irritate us. This is the kind of experience I felt called for description. Her words apply friction to a tendency in scholarly writing (to say nothing of public discourse) that assumes it knows where things belong and how to separate them out. Here is an act of imagination, there is reality; here is a literary phrase, there a mundane expression. And, as I go on to argue, here a migrant, there a German.

As you imply, I am reading anthropological approaches to language that have had a lot of important things to say about context. But I also find myself thinking in the company of a handful of philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cora Diamond, Jocelyn Benoist, and other so-called contextualists, who offer a somewhat different tack. Charles Travis, to name another, often talks about a context or occasion-sensitive view of words. In a related vein, I write in the book that “the whole of our life in language [is] contextual…language in its entirety is already world bound.” I am objecting to a view that the meaning of words transcends the contexts in which they are used. I am also responding to the idea that it is only certain portions of language that touch the ground, or more emphatically, to the idea that something must be done to fasten words to the world, that language needs securing to a context. In other words, I don’t see that there is a gap that needs to be closed between a text and a context. They come into being together.

Setrag Manoukian: The sense of possibility pervades each ethnographic situation that the reader encounters in Moving Words. This is also what makes the book such a complelling read that cannot be easily summarized in a few formulas as is too often the case. But precisely for this reason, one should not assume that your book is structured around a simplistic “it depends on context.” There are no fixed contexts. People, things and words are on the move. Languages are far from stable and bounded entities. At the same time all these movements proliferate into a variety of effects to the extent that it is ideas about languages as self contained structures that foster a set of interconnected assumptions about the relationship between people and places. Ideas that have political and economic bearings. Your book details how a series of intertwined ideas contribute in shaping what you call “dominant liberal linguistic ideology” but also a projection of Berlin’s cosmopolitanism that is also about exclusion and marginalization via literary means. You show how translation as discourse and as practice is often the vehicle of such ideologies of difference and much more, as in the case of the writer mentioned earlier that you discuss in Chapter Three. Language and political economy could not be closer. This is how you discuss the relationship between literature and migration, but also how you engage the role of cultural anthropology (since Herder !) in these projections.

Andrew Brandel: You have put your finger on a critical point where several threads are densely knit together. In Berlin, cosmopolitan welcome is often extended under the sign of translation. The translation(s) on offer come with terms; writers have to make themselves legible as writers according to European and Christian models. To put it differently, welcome is conditioned on the performance of scripts of authenticity that are impossible to reach and already anticipated by European discourse. So, on the one hand, life elsewhere is posed as just out of reach (something is always lost in translation). On the other, literature is habitually invoked (including by some anthropologists) as providing a magical bridge over the gap, getting us a little closer to the other shore. In the chapter you mentioned, I wanted to convey a sense of the profound political stakes of accepting or refusing these terms. I hasten to add that translation isn’t the only way of picturing movement in language. But there is a rush to insist on the paradigm of translation. And this has political uses, not least because it is a favored metaphor through which mobility is managed. Often, this is achieved by appealing to a troubling history (one that, as you note, incorporates anthropology) that harkens back to figures like Herder, Goethe, and Humboldt. I try to argue at the very end of the book that the hegemony of translation notwithstanding, the ethnography tends to show other possibilities abound.

I also wanted to show how that regime of translation was intertwined with the rise of trauma theory as it developed in the wake of the Holocaust. Like the culturally otherwise, the suffering of the Shoah is said to be inexpressible, outside the bounds of ordinary language. An abject failure to word the world. Because of the impossible burden of making their pain known, the Jewish victim of Nazi violence is evacuated of its concreteness and made into an exemplar, an extraordinary standard against which all other suffering is made to measure (and by rule, fails to do so). Auschwitz comes to mark the destruction of language. Didi-Huberman writes that “to speak of Auschwitz in terms of the unsayable, is not to bring oneself closer to Auschwitz. On the contrary, it is to relegate Auschwitz to a region …of metaphysical adoration, even of unknowing repetition of Nazi arcanum itself.” The abominable treatment of literary and scholarly voices articulating concern for Gazan lives is a clear consequence of this logic. The metaphysical tone of Chancellor Scholtz’s recent proclamation that the German raison d’etat is Israel’s security is another.

Setrag Manoukian: As a counterpoint to the potential reification of these linguistic ideologies, the book takes the reader through a series of ethnographic conversations and encounters that you describe in terms of networks bringing together writers, booksellers, literary critics, and others living even more precarious lives in Berlin. The captivating expression “the prosody of social ties” which you coin in Chapter Two to show the set of fleeting relationships that make a literary workshop and perhaps literature more generally, could be used to describe the relevance of relationality in your account. In addition, as I understand it, and given what we already discussed above about context, the term “social” here encompasses writing as well. Can you say something about your approach to relations?

Andrew Brandel: My sense is that this has to do with the importance of description in anthropology. Dwelling on description allows us to see the warp and weft of various textures of social relations that express themselves in everyday life. If social theory has long assumed, indeed reinforced, certain hierarchies – for example, that enduring relations are more important than fleeting ones – that isn’t what we find borne out in these scenes. It was important for me to show, moreover, how uncertain social relations can be. How uncertain the social world can be. Prosody came as a way of talking about not only the diversity of kinds of relations but also their shifting intensities and rhythms. People are moving in and out of spaces like the workshop I describe in that chapter, and their relationships are regularly changing shape, but we needn’t regard their ephemerality as a sign that such social ties are merely degraded forms of more durable ties.

I think of the social as bound up with the question of what is and isn’t considered to be a human form of life, a human language. To borrow a philosopher’s phrase, the two are mutually absorbed; form and life. In the introduction, I put it this way: “The question that arose time and again was how far the ‘naturalness of certain ways of being in the world that are recognized in one’s culture’ could be projected into the lives and practices of those in different social groups.” When do we accept something, however strange or disagreeable, as the sort of thing a human does or says? When, and for how long, do we imagine a future together?

Setrag Manoukian: Berlin is such a space of the imagination, and perhaps of geo-imagination in the sense you also describe. You trace many of these geographies of movement through the city, but overall perhaps could one say that your book is an anthropological Produkt der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Freundschaft ? In the sense that you intersect a certain pragmatist approach, most notably in Stanley Cavell’s version, with European concerns about the relationship between language and being. One could venture to say that the book addresses the question “what is Europe?” from this angle. The book is definitely not a Goodbye to Berlin but a long-term engagement with the intersection between North American anthropological concerns and a certain intellectual way of life that finds in Berlin one of its mythological high grounds. What do you think?

Andrew Brandel: Friendship is an apt word. I hadn’t thought about the connection with America until it was suggested to me by Sandra Laugier. I think it has to do with the several senses in which the book is also autobiographical. Moving Words is dedicated to my grandparents. I am the child of a family of survivors of the Shoah who took books with them to America. I reclaimed German citizenship during my fieldwork. That is one sense.

You mention Cavell, to whom I often turn for inspiration and for whom America provokes a question about inheritance; in the Carpenter Lectures, for example, he diagnoses a certain anxiety in Wittgenstein about whether “Europe itself will go on inheriting philosophy” – that is, whether one’s words or thoughts will be inherited by someone. It is a worry too about what gets excised – who counts and who doesn’t. One story Moving Words tells is about my relationship with anthropology up to this point. It is a complicated relationship, though no doubt, as my teacher Veena Das famously put it, it is also a love affair. It is thanks to her work that an attraction to anthropology in Cavell’s thought (and indeed Wittgenstein’s) has been made most apparent. I think it is true to this picture of inheritance to say that one finds their voice in borrowed words. You pick up an idea or even just a phrase, and you find it expresses you and where it takes you. A quote is never simply a repetition, though. Perhaps a new direction is opened. Some may be closed. The book then, like any really, bears the traces of the company I have kept, the people, the books, the fleeting encounters, even when unmarked or when invisible to me. This is something that is perhaps clearest in what you, I think rightly, called earlier as the “parallel conversation” happening in the notes. What I have inherited is something like a style of thought. This is another sense.

As you point out, Berlin poses several questions about the uncomfortable inheritance(s) of Europe. There is no doubt the city occupies a place of privilege in mainstream social and political theory, not least in theories of cosmopolitanism, but also because of its association with names like Benjamin and Brecht. And there has been a lot of left-liberal excitement about the city for related reasons. Part of the burden of this book is to show not just the limits of that enthusiasm but also what it can mean to live in the shadow of these – oftentimes triumphalist – stories.

Yoko Tawada (whose writing I talk about in the final chapter) says in an interview somewhere, “Europa gibt es nicht.” Europe doesn’t exist. Of course, when people use the word, they do so with the right. They mean what they say. And it has real, and most often terrible, effects. Her point is that there is no metaphysical essence that determines its meaning. Unsurprisingly, I agree. I find myself taken by David Scott’s sentiment that “Europe is bedeviled by its unreconciled pasts,” on its recurrent insistence on its presumptive historical innocence. Maybe we should speak of what Frantz Fanon called the end of “European game.” At the very end of Wretched of the Earth, he writes: “Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the comer of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.” (p. 311) Talking of Man means talking about Europe. I suppose my interest is in the sort of ontological commitments belied by the never-ending talk.
Christopher Bloechl takes the page 99 test

October 28th, 2024

My dissertation investigates the semiotics and politics of contemporary (Yucatec) Maya-language media in the Mexican Yucatán.* Page 99 appears in chapter two, which examines how announcers at a popular radio station in southern Yucatán employ their medium as a means for encouraging ethnic awareness and solidarity among the station’s Maya listeners. In the chapter, I survey programming content, analyze broadcast speech, and interpret the identity work of radio announcers in light of the perspectives of local Maya listeners. The chapter develops a portrait of the current state of Maya identity politics in Yucatán. It also reveals the state in Maya identity politics. That is to say, the chapter clarifies the role of the Mexican government as principal mediator of Maya ethnolinguistic advocacy in Yucatán. On page 99, having just summarized the missions of three national institutes that endorse and administer Indigenous culture and language within Mexico, I offer a claim about the governmental mediation:

The institutes and their organizational affiliates present their activities as fostering the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversidad (diversity) of Mexico. Yet, the work has consequential homogenizing effects in the domains of ethnicity, culture, and language. The cultivation of different archives—of language, history, material culture, and so on—renders distinct ethnolinguistic groups as tokens of the same Indigenous type. (99)

I then provide some relevant historical context, citing Ben Fallaw’s (1997) work on indigenismo ideology and national politics in Mexico in the 1930s. I believe that the empirical claim and historical contextualization illustrate the quality of the dissertation, and I was glad to see both elements when I revisited the page for this test! But my ethnographic and linguistic evidence for the claim (in other words, the homogenizing effects evident at my field site) does not appear until the following page, and for this reason I think that page 99 does not quite encapsulate the quality of the dissertation as a whole.

Predictably, certain other pages are more representative of the value of the dissertation as a linguistic-anthropological study. In chapter five, for example, I offer a variety of linguistic examples that demonstrate that the emerging Maya standard, despite its marked lexical purism, adheres to certain Spanish syntactic and pragmatic conventions (for example, see pages 183, 190–3, 199–204). And throughout the dissertation, I provide ethnographic descriptions, interview data, and analyses of mediatized texts that reveal and clarify ongoing changes in the social meanings of maaya ‘Maya’ and máasewal ‘Indian, Indigenous’ in Yucatán (for examples, see pages 60–4, 85–7, 155–7). Those pages shed more light on the basic tension or problem that I explored in the dissertation, namely, that while Maya advocates aim to maintain their language and culture, their work actually transforms both in different and important ways.

*Yucatec Maya speakers refer to their language as ‘Maya’ (maaya). I follow that convention here.

Bloechl, Christopher. 2023. Voicing the Maya: Media Technologies & Politics of Ethnolinguistic

     Identity in Yucatán. PhD dissertation, University of Chicago.

Fallaw, Ben. 1997. Cárdenas and the Caste War That Wasn’t: State Power and Indigenismo in

     Post-Revolutionary Yucatán. In The Americas 53(4):551-577.
Grace Cooper takes the page 99 test

October 21st, 2024

When offered the chance to take the page 99 test, I imagined that page 99 of my dissertation would have little to do with its core purpose—using anthropology as a tool to understand, honor, document, and share the experiences of patients whose access to healthcare in the US is stipulated by their im/migration status. I was pleasantly surprised when I turned to page 99 and read the following passage.

“Of the seven focal participants in this research, four were women and mothers. Flor and Esperanza had both come to the United States in their 40s and did not have children in the United States. However, both were grandmothers when we met during fieldwork and were well-experienced in the healthcare options available for young children and their mothers in Philadelphia’s immigrant community. In this section, I will discuss healthcare access in maternity wards for uninsured and, specifically, undocumented women through the stories of Evelin and Gabriela, two women from Honduras. Both were in their 30s when we met, and both were (and still are) in long-term relationships with undocumented Latinx men working in manual labor positions.

Evelin has seven children, and five were born in Honduras. She gave birth to her youngest son, Wilmer, in New York City in 2016. Evelin gave birth to her youngest daughter, Jessica, during my fieldwork. I was there with her and Antonio at Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital on
January 9th, 2019, when they welcomed Jessica to their family. Gabriela has three children, and one child was born in Honduras. Before we met, Gabriela gave birth to her two youngest sons, Augusto, and Bruno, at Einstein Hospital and Hahnemann Hospital, respectively. With pregnancy experience in both the United States and Honduras, Gabriela and Evelin had much to say about the healthcare systems in the United States compared to the healthcare system in Honduras.”

Looking at this passage, a reader can glean some key points about my dissertation. First, it focuses on the experiences of a focal group of undocumented and uninsured Latinx patients in Philadephia, and second, it offers insights from research done in medical settings. The reader would be right on both counts. My dissertation relies on ethnographic data collected during five years of Philadelphia-based fieldwork completed across medical and non-medical settings. It includes data from field notes, transcriptions of interviews, and a corpus of audio-visual materials. The reader can also estimate that my dissertation boldly underscores the knowledge and insights of the focal participants. Right again! My analysis revealed that undocumented and uninsured immigrants complete many valuable roles within our healthcare system beyond that of simply the patient. One example of this is the participation of undocumented immigrants in
Philadelphia’s 2020 census program known as “Philly Counts,” in which they served as trusted community messengers who helped increase Census participation, thereby increasing federal funds allocated to the city’s health centers, which remain major access points for uninsured and underinsured Philadelphians.

This page 99 passage, however, leaves out two crucial components of my dissertation:
the theoretical foundations and the wider-reaching contributions. Broadly, my dissertation uses frameworks from linguistic and medical anthropology, and more specifically, it utilizes Lynette Arnold’s (2016) concept of “communicative care,” which she defines as “all the ways that language functions to sustain human existence” (38). With this grounding in the excellent work of my predecessors, my dissertation aims to provide nuanced empirical evidence of the lived expertise of patients whose rejection by the healthcare system informs their strategic efforts for policy reform and their movement for the ratification of healthcare as a human right.

References:
Arnold, Lynnette. 2016. “Communicative Care Across Borders: Language, Materiality, and Affect in Transnational Family Life.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of California Santa Barbara.
Elliot Montpellier takes the page 99 test

October 16th, 2024

Page 99 of my dissertation offers only a half-page of writing. The top half contains a screenshot from YouTube of the original soundtrack (OST) for the Hum TV drama Aitebaar (trust) seen below. The page is near the conclusion of the (very long) first chapter, “Drama ascendancy: genealogies and dominance of remediated televisuality.”

The page nevertheless sheds light on an important example in the chapter and a jumping off point for considering the wider dissertation. The chapter that traces connections between print culture, television, and online video distribution in Muslim South Asian media economies. It theorizes ‘ascendancy’ in relation to interlocutors’ framing of their media traditions, lineages, and transmission as well as their labour in the context of ascendant.

The dissertation examines how the digitalizing of broadcast media such as networks’ simulcasting of shows on YouTube, the use of platform analytics, and Big Data audience measurement techniques have shifted the industry’s perceptions of its audience. Through a multi-sited and multimodal ethnographic approach based in Karachi, diasporic communities, and online, the dissertation argues that processes of audience appraisal, feedback, and the segmentation of viewership have not only generated new logics of economization, but also that these cannot be appreciated without contending with the industry’s representation of religiosity.

Screenshot of the Aitebaar OST on YouTube, approximately one year after being uploaded (accessed 7 February 2023)

Aitebaar is one of the drama sets where I spent time getting to know crews, production practices, and rhythms of creative spaces. I first encountered the OST at the headquarters of a major production house, just off Karachi’s commercial center along I.I. Chundrigar Rd. that was doubling as a set on that day. After filming, I went with the cast to a small office to view the completed OST before it was uploaded to YouTube. The OST reflects different ways that dramas extend far beyond the TV series alone, how these extensions generate the dramas’ intermedial power, and the mediatization of their religious vernaculars.

On p. 99, I highlight how lines such as the refrain that is superimposed on the video, meri wafa pe tujh ko, aitebaar na raha, (translates to “My faithfulness/devotion is no longer trusted by you”), contains multiple meanings. This devotion indexes both plot-specific romantic elements as well as metaphysical ones. Such heteroglossia is common in the verses of qawwali and other Urdu poetics. These are appeals to genealogies of musical practice and poetics that feature as central elements for the marketing and consumption of these televisual productions.

Montpellier, Elliot. 2023. “Mediatizing Islam: the digital turn and the promotion of piety in a Pakistani culture industry.” Ph.D. diss., Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Shannon Ward on her book, Amdo Lullaby

October 15th, 2024

Hyemin Lee: Your book, Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau, offers an insightful exploration of the anthropological question of how senses of cultural belonging and identity are rooted in languages. You provided critical insights into this profound question by meticulously examining the language socialization trajectories of Amdo Tibetan children.

https://utorontopress.com/9781487558673/amdo-lullaby/

Hyemin Lee: Your book, Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau, offers an insightful exploration of the anthropological question of how senses of cultural belonging and identity are rooted in languages. You provided critical insights into this profound question by meticulously examining the language socialization trajectories of Amdo Tibetan children.

Could you tell us about your research trajectory that culminated in writing this book? Specifically, I am interested in what “Amdo, Tibet” means to you and your studies as a research site and a place that holds meanings. What makes Amdo uniquely significant for conducting ethnographic research on childhood, language shift, and language socialization/acquisition?

Shannon Ward: Amdo is a borderland region characterized by long histories of migration and cultural flows that have contributed to evolving forms of language contact. While it sits at the easternmost end of Tibet, it also exemplifies the complex forms of movement that variously characterize “Tibet” as a cultural and linguistic region, an occupied country, and a diasporic homeland.

I first came to know Amdo as an undergraduate student in 2011, when I completed a senior thesis project with Tibetan women living in exile in Dharamsala, India. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the pre-eminent figure in Tibetan Buddhism and played a central role in establishing a sovereign Tibetan government-in-exile seated in Dharamsala. Although today, rural-to-urban migration arguably represents the most common pattern of geographic movement in the region, from the 1980s until 2008, many Tibetans arriving in exile in India came from Amdo. Back in 2011, most of the interlocutors who shared with me their journeys of traversing the Himalayas to reach the schools and monasteries supported by His Holiness the Dalai Lama were born and raised in Amdo. My experiences of learning to speak Tibetan alongside these interlocutors sparked my fascination with diversity within Tibet. Their reminiscences and hopes for return, either to visit their families upon acquiring valid travel documents or to see Tibet repatriated as an independent nation, motivated me to continue to learn about this region.

During my graduate studies, I was able to study the language and history of Amdo more thoroughly. The current 14^th Dalai Lama’s migration from Amdo to Lhasa as a young child exemplifies the ways that Buddhist practices and governance have unified the Tibetan plateau, especially since the 7^th century. The particular local histories of migrations within Amdo, such as that of the focal family described in Chapter 1, illuminate how place-based belonging is reproduced through language variation. The centrality of place in constituting linguistic differentiation, both in the Tibetan exile community and within Amdo itself, is an enduring pattern that I continue to encounter in my research and that frames this book.

Amdo is an important site for conducting ethnography with children, because children are at the forefront of change—both cultural and linguistic. Overlapping local histories of migration and language contact in Amdo provide us with a unique lens to examine how the creative forms of linguistic change that children enact also draw on longer-term cultural and linguistic histories that adults often overlook. For example, as charted in Chapter 1 and the Conclusion, I argue that even when children shift from speaking their native Amdo Tibetan to Mandarin, they are drawing on cultural logics that associate language variation with place-based belonging. The meanings of places within Amdo, and of Amdo as a place within Tibet, are co-constituted through children’s language acquisition and socialization.

Hyemin Lee: You discuss your methodologies on fieldwork and writing through the concept of “Ethnographic Narrative” (xxii). Could you elaborate more on this approach, particularly what you intend to convey to readers through it?

Shannon Ward: I conceived of ethnographic narrative as a way to balance the need to convey linguistic details, while also thickly describing my subjective experiences of participant observation and preserving the confidentiality of participants. As a linguistic anthropologist, my fieldwork involves playing with children and actively participating in their conversations, and also meticulously transcribing and analyzing their talk. Both participant observation and careful transcription represent important pieces of the ethnographic record, an approach developed by Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin as an essential facet of the practice of language socialization research. As I demonstrate in the section “Narrative and Transcription Conventions,” transcription is not a transparent process of reproducing content from recordings to written form, but instead entails complex choices about how to interpret the literal and intended meanings of language, as well as the broader cultural meanings of the practices enacted through language. For example, during transcription sessions, adults referred to Amdo Tibetan sentence-final particles as having “no meaning” (36). Through participant observation, I also encountered adults who described these particles as “Chinese” when they were spoken by children (50). These interpretations of children’s grammar show how children are being identified as agents of language shift.

In my writing, I used two primary strategies of narration to achieve this balance between linguistic detail and thick description. First, I depicted transcripts as dialogues, with annotations in an appendix. With this technique, I hope that readers can appreciate both the unfolding social actions in the dialogues and the grammatical details of talk. Second, I created composite scenes and characters to support the narrative arch of the ethnography and to ensure confidentiality. While the decision to include composites has complex ethical implications, I felt it was necessary to demonstrate the significance of Amdo kinship structures without providing details that could identify individual participants. Ultimately, I aimed for composites to communicate the meaning of “real cultural events” (Clifford 1986, 98) that lead us to a broader understanding of processes of language socialization. That is, composites allow ethnographic narrative to highlight the most significant patterns of language use, which I derived through the analysis of fieldnotes and transcripts.

Hyemin Lee: I noticed that your book is in a dialogue with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) and his concept of colonial alienation. Could you explain how you came to integrate Thiong’o into your book? What do you see as the most critical dynamics and consequences of language shift in Xining, as they relate to “colonial alienation”?

Shannon Ward: I can thank Sonia Das for introducing me to this foundational work, which describes language is used in institutions that perpetuate colonial domination. I was inspired by this work because of its significance to understanding language and power, as well as its focus on childhood. While Ngũgĩ writes retrospectively about his childhood, I was curious as to how we could analyze colonial alienation during children’s everyday experiences.

In the context of Tibet, I see two primary dynamics of colonial alienation, which contribute to language shift to Mandarin in Xining. The first is education policy, which provides for bilingual education only in rural areas officially designated as autonomous counties or prefectures. In addition, shifting policies continuously redefine the scope of bilingual education, sometimes emphasizing the acquisition of Mandarin over Tibetan. Education policies in Tibet are similar to those that Ngũgĩ describes, because the acquisition of the dominant language through education outside of the village homeland is necessary for socio-economic mobility.

The second dynamic is the rise of a standard language ideology that privileges monolingualism. Tibet is a region with a deep history of multilingualism, but the politicization of language as a marker of political belonging has meant that children are encouraged to choose to speak a single language. As demonstrated in the ethnographic scenes in chapter 4, this ideology is re-instantiated in everyday interactions that shame children for their intuitive language practices, such as code-mixing, and discursively identify urban children as Mandarin speakers. I argue that the rise of a standard language ideology is linked to colonial alienation through colonial tools, such as censuses and schools, that associate ethnic groups with single written languages.

Hyemin Lee: Chapter 5 offers an insightful exploration of the possibilities of “urban belonging” (139) facilitated by the literacy activity “I Read.” Do you see literacy activities like “I Read” as a potential alternative practice (in contrast to (traditional) Tibetan language activism) for promoting ethnolinguistic diversity and inclusion, both within and beyond Tibetan contexts?

Shannon Ward: Chapter 5 is directly inspired by theories of the sequential unfolding of co-operative action, developed through the work of Chuck and Candy Goodwin. In “I Read,” parents and children created space for multilingualism through their conversations, which I feel is essential for the vitality of minoritized languages more generally. In my understanding, the parents conceived of this activity primarily to facilitate children’s social connections rather than as a form of language instruction. This framing allowed children’s creative uses of language to emerge more freely.

I feel that providing structured activity settings informed by goals for inclusion can promote ethnolinguistic diversity beyond Tibet. In Amdo, as in many settings, individual parents seemed to take primary responsibility for facilitating these activities. Community-based projects such as “I Read” represent a powerful form of activism, and they can also be supported by institutionalized programs. In my new research with children in Canada, for example, I found that government funding supports free preschool programs, such as Strong Start in British Columbia, to encourage new immigrant parents who speak diverse languages to engage in structured play together. Such programs support the efforts of local communities to facilitate inclusion.

However, communities facing language shift may also develop programs for explicit instruction in their language. In a society dominated by formal education and the commodification of language, this approach can elevate the status of minoritized languages. I think these different forms of language activism—overt efforts for language instruction versus community-based programs not explicitly focused on language—demonstrate the dynamic tension between language standardization as a form of reclaiming language and belonging, but also a potential contributing factor to the loss of internal linguistic diversity within communities. An approach to language activism that incorporates both forms of programming might be most effective for sustaining young children’s multilingualism.

Hyemin Lee: A key strength of your book lies in its contribution to language activism and language rights by representing and advocating for the voices of young children in minoritized language communities. What do you see as the broader implication of your book? How do you envision this book making its own ethical pathways to Tibetan language advocacy within academia and beyond?

Shannon Ward: The broader implication of this book is that children know much more than adults may recognize. In relation to language advocacy, this book has the potential to center the significance of everyday talk and young children’s social relationships in efforts to sustain linguistic diversity. For academics, it calls on us to bring critical perspectives on childhood into the study of language revitalization and language shift. For communities working to reverse language shift, it suggests the importance of including young children in language planning efforts.
Suk-Young Kim on her book, Millennial North Korea

October 14th, 2024

https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/millennial-north-korea

Haeeun Shin: Could you share about your intellectual trajectory of Millennial North Korea? What triggered you to have an interest in North Koreans’ digital culture? How does this brand-new book relate to your previous works?

Suk-Young Kim: Millennial North Korea is a sequel to my first book, Illusive Utopia, which is a half a century history of North Korean state-produced propaganda performances. Encompassing a wide range of media such as live theater films or recorded live performances, and visual culture is so crucial for understanding theatrical strategy as operating principles of North Korean society. I accomplished an important historical overview of the cultural history of North Korea for half a century, from the post-war period, or 1948, to 2000 towards the end of the Kim Jong Il era.

There have been so much seismic transformations taking place in Korea in the past two decades. So I wanted to write a sequel that updates the current state of the society, the widening gap between the state and the people, and various economic classes emerging, especially in regards to accessibility to new media technology. Millennial North Korea is a sequel to Illusive Utopia.

Additionally, between 2010, when Illusive Utopia was published, and 2018 when I started writing this new book, I was heavily immersed in researching K-pop and youth digital culture. I thought Hallyu does not stop at DMZ. While I was writing very directly about South Korean pop culture, I had a parallel thought that this is also impacting North Korea.

In particular, I focused on the youth culture, which is deeply embedded in the sense of mobility and breaking away from legacy media. The cell phone is a key player in this and is the main star of the book among all other electronic devices. While other forms of media such as films and TV require a sense of community, cell phones allow you to consume mobile digital culture in a very private setting. Also, people take their media anywhere they want through cell phones. I latched onto this idea when I wrote K-pop Live, which came out in 2018, and I’m somewhat influenced by that vision when I think of North Koreans as well. As cell phone comes in, North Korean youth have an easier time accessing forbidden media and consuming it. The act of consuming forbidden media with mobile devices confirms the individual assertion of a subject that declares resistance against state directives.

Haeeun Shin: Could you say a little about the North Korean Millennials whom your book addresses?

Suk-Young Kim: I clearly say that North Korean millennials are defined by their performative identity. It’s a multifaceted identitarian construct. It is not something that is just defined by your gender or your age. It is not the biological construct by any means, millennials, but it’s that performative identity.

One big part of it is curiosity – intellectual, cultural, or economic curiosity about reality outside of this failed state system – and daringness to explore. That is a very key word for me. In North Korea, it requires tremendous courage and rebellion to watch something from South Korea. It does come from your intention of wanting to know and wanting to take the risk outside of this draconian surveillance state system. So, curiosity and daringness are very important identitarian layers of who North Korean millennials are, at least the ones that I addressed in my book.

The second layer is tech savviness. If you want to have a glimpse of the outside world, you have to have some platform or some media to have a glimpse and explore. A lot of it is their exposure, and accessibility to technology, especially cell phones.

The last one I consider together is their economic status because having smartphones costs you money. Of course, cell phones are widespread in North Korea but I mean it’s not for everyone. According to the latest data before COVID, roughly one out of four had cell phones nowadays, which means not everyone has cell phones like in South Korea or elsewhere. It does claim a certain economic status.

To recap, it is the kind of performative identitarian construct that prioritizes the subjects, courage, willingness, and daringness to take risks and explore. Secondarily, to enable that, you need to have access to technology and you have to have certain economic means. They are North Korean millennials that I addressed in my book.

Haeeun Shin: The idea of reactive creativity is essential in your book. What messages do you want to convey to readers about the relationship between North Korean millennials and the state using this concept?

Suk-Young Kim: I made a claim that North Koreans are not just passive victims of a repressive regime, but they are very smart, creative, and resourceful. How does that manifest in their lives? That’s when the concepts of reactive creativity and the hidden script come in.

First, I point out that creativity is not just a domain of liberal Western society. In academia, especially, in anthropology and sociology, there’s a lot of resurging discourse around creativity and creative economy, which is in large part related to the rising tech industry in Silicon Valley and major cities. In those studies, an alternate kind of political system is never their consideration. I think that is wrong because people even living under unimaginable circumstances, human rights infringement, and economic hardship, also exercise creativity. That’s why I put reactive creativity as a modifier to specify the specific conditions of North Korea.

By reactive, I don’t necessarily mean passivity or negativity. Reactive means that they can react in response to this constant oppression, but they can act upon it by walking on a very tricky terrain while dodging the surveillance system. They can still communicate and express the degree of their self-expression, their place in the world, and their ways of living and realizing their dreams without being detected to the point of self-annihilation. Hidden scripts and all kinds of coded language that I described in the book are crucial ways of living this dual life of being a compliant political subject or performing it in daily life, while also realizing to a very limited and reactive degree, their sense of desire to know more, beyond what is fed by the regime. It’s a very dualistic, ambivalent way of living.

Haeeun Shin: I enjoyed reading how you highlight the uniqueness of North Korean millennials’ digital culture with the concept of blockchain and platforms. Could you elaborate further on your choice to use these two concepts to comprehend millennial North Korea?

Suk-Young Kim: In today’s world, everyone uses platforms and blockchain as an important concept. I strategically use those buzzwords to show the reversal of how we normally understand it and what that word could mean in a case like North Korea.

Platforms, in a way, create new digital tribes who fall deeply into their rabbit hole. People who get to stick to one platform, go deep with it and stick with that community, are likely to have narrow-mindedness, which I think is a huge irony in today’s technologized world. In North Korea, platforms don’t emerge online, which is the number one difference. Also, while Western platform society tends to make your vision very narrow, in North Korea, it’s somewhat similar, but the platforms are to expand your vision rather than narrow it, which is the second difference.

When we think of blockchain, transparency is a key idea. There is a transparent ledger so we know how funding, like Bitcoin, was transmitted without revealing the identity of the participant. In North Korea, when hidden media circulates, they also have to go through that transmission. But again, in North Korea, it’s all offline, person-to-person transmission, not a transparently recorded ledger that people can trace online. In this circumstance, transparency in blockchain, in the North Korean sense, is not something similar to what you normally see in how blockchain works in our society. Transparency in North Korean blockchain transactions means credibility and trust. You have to trust the person to whom you’re giving this forbidden media and the person who is giving it to you. When that transaction chain somehow is revealed, then all of the participants can face grave consequences. I cite some of those instances in my book. So it’s a very different idea of blockchain, but some principles are retained in North Korean case.

Haeeun Shin: In anthropology conducting research on North Korea has been challenging due to restricted access for visits. Can you provide any advice or suggestions for people conducting research on North Korea without visiting?

Suk-Young Kim: We can research North Korea far from it. I think my discipline of performance studies is the right place as it specializes in the performance of memory and trauma and the strategy of narrating the story. What people tell you for a reason, whether that is subconscious or a construction of yourself through your narration that comes into play, and how they present themselves is a valid subject of research.

In this context, it’s very valuable to speak to resettlers who have more freedom to narrate and construct their stories. They still deal with a lot of degrees of limitations as to what they want to say and what they can say, but they have a much higher degree of freedom compared to the degree that they dealt with draconian surveillance in North Korea.

Number one advice: We have to be honest about our limitations that the stories we’re going to hear come from a certain perspective. It doesn’t represent the entirety of the possibilities in North Korea.

Number two, when people narrate their past, as much as they want to be factual and reality- based stories that they want to share, we should understand that memory is largely made of imagination. It’s never a pure recalling of the past but made of some virtual dimension. Through imagination of what the past was, sometimes what they narrate is filtered in. Also, you have to be fully aware that many resettlers are traumatized by leaving the country, which we seldom experienced. So when you want to cite something, you have to double-check to decide whether to quote or not. If you were interviewing one subject over a sustainable time and there’s a very sensitive subject you want to verify again, ask the person, but in a slightly different format. Also, cross-check across two different subjects. Ask another interviewee and if they confirm the same fact, then you feel confident quoting it.

Lastly, as an ending remark, I want to say that I am very humbled to be the person who is a channel through which my interviewees can speak and voice themselves. I hope I did some justice to their lives and stories. I think that’s the role I play as an author of this book.