The Silent Knight: Ideologies of Languagelessness in BATGIRL (2000-2006)
by Mike Mena
Why study comics? Simple: they reflect and refract ideologies present in everyday life. Comics are a politically saturated medium that can offer something different to our understanding of American pop-culture. Indeed, the themes and events in comics are often barely-disguised analogies to American life. For example, the character Scarecrow is a psychologist obsessed with fear and known for his hallucinogenic, fear-inducing gas. It is no coincidence that the Scarecrow character began to explicitly resemble a stereotypical terrorist in the months following 9/11. Again, comics refract our reality, even our fears.
My focus here is a less obvious example involving Cassandra Cain, codename: Batgirl. Over the first several pages of the series, we see racial signs and qualities being visually added to Batgirl (Mena 2024). For example, in the first images of Cassandra, her skin tone is quite literally tinted “yellow” in comparison to the surrounding bodies on the page. We eventually get the point: Cassandra is supposed to be a “Asian teen girl.” We might also expect this stereotype to come with specific bodily behaviors, such as “feminine passivity” and “quietness.”
But, here is the twist: Batgirl totally dominates!
What made Batgirl immediately fascinating to me was the problem she presented to the comic book medium itself. Batgirl couldn’t use language, which meant the main character of the story would not have dialogue. (And, no thought-bubbles either!) As a linguistic anthropologist, I was hooked.
I immediately noticed an increased dependence on other semiotic elements, or other signs that also communicate information. In particular, her facial expressions and bodily gestures would take on increased significance. And, that Batgirl’s mask is permanently stitched closed holds much symbolic potential. But, exactly why Batgirl can’t speak is the most fascinating part. Let’s review.
Cassandra Cain was abducted at birth and raised by an assassin who intentionally deprived her of all language (in a uniquely cruel and comic-bookie way). Why? As her captor/father’s logic went: depriving Cassandra of linguistic ability would focus her attention exclusively on reading the body, giving her the ability to predict her opponent’s moves. It made her lethal, undefeatable—unkillable.
Her mentor, Batman himself, described her fighting skills as perfect. I agreed. To me, she became the perfect Batgirl! But, perhaps I got too excited, too quickly. Soon the story would take a turn, a linguistic turn.
Let’s skip to what happens: she magically learns English. Well, to be clear, a random superhuman with psychic abilities “organized” her thoughts… for her… in English. Honestly, when I read this, I wasn’t quite sure how I felt at first. Thus far, my favorite element of this comic book was Batgirl’s lack of dialogue, because it precluded any straightforward character development that depended on text. That was exciting and novel.
Unfortunately, it became apparent that her new ability to understand English entirely disrupted her ability to read bodies. Cassandra went from being a “perfect” Batgirl to an utterly unremarkable one. In fact, the word “mediocre” would be selected by Batgirl herself to describe her entire new existence.
Why would learning English interfere with her ability to comprehend other kinds of communicatory signs? Or, rephrased: Why would learning English disrupt Batgirl’s ability to read bodies?
Well, it would not. But, in the United States many believe it would.
To understand where this ideological belief comes from, we need only to look how we treat bilingual children in the United States. There are many ideologies that shape our understanding of language learning and bilingual children, but let’s talk about the white supremacist ones—they are more entertaining and more relevant here.
We can start with a generalized aversion to language mixing (and/or code-switching). Not all mixing, just the kind perceived as coming from stigmatized folks. If we don’t like language mixture, that must mean we have some ideas about language purity. Many folks in the United States subscribe to the idea that putatively pure language allows for pure and unconfused thought. So, in a white supremacist culture, we might say stuff like:
“Black English is a ‘broken’ version of (White Dominant) English.”
“They don’t speak Spanish or English, they speak Spanglish, which is not a ‘real’ language.”
“Don’ t let the students use Spanish in class, it will confuse their English.”
Put simply, when it comes to stigmatized bilinguals in the United States, we can count on two things: 1) their language(s) will always be seen as impure, confused, deficient, and mediocre; and 2) “Standard” English monolingualism is the norm in the United States.
In fact, scholars have noticed that some schools have a special designation for certain racialized students as not having any language whatsoever—in other words, they speak no institutionally legible language, and therefore said to have no language. Jonathan Rosa (2016) calls this the ideology of “languagelessness,” where a language user’s linguistic competence becomes questioned, and by extension, their entire personhood. Sadly, once English was added to Batgirl’s communicatory repertoire, she lost her ability to read body language. But, while she now understood English, she still could not speak, read, or write.
All things considered, what made possible her ability to reach perfection was her monolingualism. And, once the other language was added, the core of her identity was subtracted.
Clearly, we appear to have some strange ideologies regarding language and language learning. Yet, we might also remember another ideology always working in the background: “This is America and we (only) speak English.”
So, let’s ask again: Why study comic books? We are entering a new political age; one that thrives on pop-culture (mis)information and digital (il)literacies. And, comic books are just one more pop-culture medium capable of disseminating harmful ideologies at a massive scale. We would be wise to pay attention.
Credits:
“Cassandra Cain as BATGIRL” (2000-2006). Kelley Puckett (author), Scott Peterson
(author), Robert Camanella (artist), and Damion Scott (artist).
Mena, Mike (2024). “How to ‘Become White’: A Dummies guide to Semiotic whitening.”
Rosa, Jonathan Daniel. 2016. “Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies across Communicative Contexts.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 26 (2): 162–83.
Jennifer Biddle: As a way of beginning, could you briefly introduce yourselves, and what brought you together on this project. Why this book now?
Fred Myers: People in Australia– including art critics and art historians — have been criticizing anthropology as a framework for Indigenous art for a long time. Indigenous Australian critics in particular objected to Indigenous works being placed in ethnographic or natural history museums rather than in art galleries considered higher status, recognizing artistry rather than culture. As an ethnographer of Western Desert people, I have documented many paintings and the place of this work in people’s lives affords me knowledge that is relevant to the paintings and their subject matter. Terry is one of the main Australian art historians with a sustained interest and engagement with Aboriginal art, theorizing its placement in the field of contemporary art. We have been in discussion about Indigenous Australian art since the 1990s.
In 2022, near the end of the pandemic, numerous Papunya Tula works were exhibited at the Australian Consul General’s Residency in New York, on loan from two collections, those of John and Barbara Wilkerson, and Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield. When Terry was in New York, we decided to visit, look at the paintings and discuss them, record it, and make that the basis of some writing. We wanted to show those less familiar that these works merited serious consideration as individual works of art. This kind of attention to specific paintings was finally emerging—in exhibitions and in John Kean’s recent book on the innovations of early Papunya Tula art [Dot Circle and Frame: The Making of Papunya Tula Art, Perth: Upswell Publishing2023]. We were aware of the persistence of the unfortunate ethnography/art history binary in the Western art world. We hoped to show that by combining Terry’s more formal analysis and my knowledge of the stories, people, places, and cultural contexts, we could illuminate how the artists chose to put their millennia-old painting traditions into two-dimensional form to show others.
Terry Smith: Indigenous art has posed a great, and productive, challenge to art historians, especially since it became a powerful component of contemporary art.
During my art history training at the University of Melbourne in the mid-1960s, and then at the University of Sydney, Indigenous art appeared only when Picasso visited museums in Paris, then, shockingly, painted Iberian and Africa masks on the heads of the naked women in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Despite various developments around so-called primitivism, few understood this art to be a contemporaneous kind of contemporary art.
Until, in the 1980s, when the extraordinary paintings and sculptures by Indigenous artists in remote communities in north and central Australia began to be circulated by curators, and non-Indigenous contemporary artists responded to them in their own work. In the 1990s, suddenly, both kinds of art historical contemporaneity became possible, more visible, then undeniable.
I was updating Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting, the basic textbook for the field, then twenty years out of date. I saw the need for a chapter on this new art movement, so I undertook research trips to several remote communities, country towns, and inner cities throughout Australia. Many small revelations and one big one followed: that Australian Aboriginal Art was not only a contemporaneous kind of contemporary art, but also its advent—unpredicted, multiplicitous, self-generative and undeniably powerful—suggested that several other major artistic developments occurring throughout the world, many with comparable qualities, were themselves contemporaneous. In short, contemporary art was not a style imposed on the rest of the world by the major art centers. My own subsequent books on contemporary art, some of them now widely used textbooks, have been shaped by this realisation. [For example, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Lawrence King, and Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2011 and 2012).]
In Australia, a dense discourse has arisen around this art, with a growing number of Indigenous voices, the artists themselves, curators, critics, administrators and historians, leading the field. The Yamatji curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist has written a wonderful, acute Afterword for the book. He cites Bandjalungcurator Djon Mundine’s condemnation of the “tournaments taken up between the imperial Houses of Anthropology and Art History.” Very few of us, I think, have been able to combine these discourses to provide, let’s say, the thick descriptions of the best (that is, radically reflexive) anthropology with the micro- and macro-scale accounts of the best (also, radically reflexive) art history. Perhaps our book shows that we are riding side by side, not aiming at each other.
Jennifer Biddle: The book focuses on six paintings from a substantive archive, numerous national and international collections, early and more recent paintings. Why did you select these works?
Fred Myers: We decided to look closely at the early paintings. I knew many of the artists and what they said they were doing. The paintings are well documented; they are from the early period that marks the development of the art movement. We picked paintings for what they seemed to offer aesthetically (formally) and, because of my knowledge of the painter and context. The choice to begin with Kingsley Norris’s seemingly simple painting was Terry’s idea, to start with what seemed to be the earliest painting, in which the dotting was most limited. Others were paintings from men who were dedicated painters, making work that seemed particularly inventive. Four of the paintings were favourites with qualities I wanted to understand better. For one, the enclosure in Wartuma’s painting The Trial [the cover image of the book] shows the importance of understanding mythological and geographical dimensions that motivate the artist. These works also have strong iconographic dimensions, as I have argued, significant for the artist. For me, this project has been an effort to understand what the painters thought they were doing with their work and how they brought intention into visual form. Each painting is an attempt to bring experience(s) of place, story (mythological events), and ceremonial performance into two-dimensional form. Some men were really drawn to this activity and demonstrated virtuosity worthy of sustained attention, what I have called a local art history.
Terry Smith: Fred has identified our main motivations. We were, of course, constrained by what was available in the exhibition: thirteen paintings from the early years at Papunya, 1971 to 1976, all from the Wilkerson’s superb collection of 50 works from that period. To give some context, 1,200 to 1,500 paintings on various kinds of board were produced at Papunya between 1971 and 1973 by more than 40 artists. A much smaller number of artists, half that, made most of these. We are in dialogue with the many interpretations of Papunya painting: the records of the many art advisors who worked at Papunya Tula, the original accounts of Geoff Bardon, the scholarship of Vivien Johnson and others, and the important exhibitions of curators such as Bernice Murphy, Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman Hetti Perkins, Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra woman Brenda L Croft, Henry Skerritt, and others. The Introduction maps this art historiography in some detail.
My art critical instincts led me to focus us on the originary moment around May 1971; thus we begin with Kingsley Tjungurrayi’s Stars, Rain, and Lightning at Night, the third work listed in the first record of these paintings. We then follow developments to the later months of 1972, when a dozen or so of the men were painting together in a corrugated iron shed at Papunya, many on an almost daily basis. This gave us the chance to evoke the interaction between them as they shared information about their Dreaming [Ancestral, mythological] stories and visual ideas about how to paint them. Some photographs suggest how intense this must have been. But the paintings are the best evidence. Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi working on his Classic Pintupi Water Dreaming alongside Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula as he creates his masterpiece Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa. To me, these interactions are on a par with some of the most celebrated collaborations in the history of art.
The outcome is a dialogue between an anthropologist/ethnographer and an art critic/historian/theorist that has generated 4 to 6,000 words about each painting. This is not exceptional when it comes to passages in books on well-known, even middling, artists working in Western traditions. Indigenous artists in Australia, however, are usually less well served: mostly, a few bland sentences about what the authors understand to be the story underlying the painting are followed by a few more sentences about the medium and the technique used to present it.
Jennifer Biddle: You center paintings as active material agents, whose work is neither finished nor replete. “The conversation” of the subtitle is as much between you two as between the paintings and audience(s): their instigations, engagements, affective and effective potencies. “Our responsibility is to open ourselves to these objects, to see as best we can what they have to say, and to say what it is that we are seeing” (2024: xii). You also identify the “politics of the gift” (2024:17 ff). Could you reflect on what you mean by this gift, this responsibility?
Fred Myers: The question of how this work enters into the broader field of art came up as we went beyond initial conversations. I have always been taken by the Pintupi painters’ discussion of “giving” (yunginpa) the paintings, the same word often used for the ceremonial transfer of knowledge (as a gift), or sometimes to speak of revealing (which is a form of giving). I knew that the artist Bobby West Tjupurrula, a co-curator of the major retrospective Tjungunutja: From having come together [with Sid Anderson, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Michael Nelson Jagamarra AM, Joseph Jurrah Tjapaltjarri, and Luke Scholes, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, 2017] spoke of the paintings as a gift that needed to be reciprocated, with payment analogous to moments when young men might give meat to elders in return for the revelation of knowledge. So, we had to reflect on what we were doing in this analytical work. These works had been sent out into the world, coming to us in some ways as a gift and we have envisioned our response to the works as a return, hoping to render more clearly what the gift is and to help generate the responses they deserve. The painters insisted to me very early in my own research, that the paintings were not made up but dear, and the Law. The stories, designs, and places are identified with or belong to persons who alone have the right to show or paint them. Even if given, the rights to paint, to reproduce, remain with the person with whom it is identified… and thus, anthropologists have learned, they are inalienable, tied to this ancestral authority and identity. That is the subject of much of my writing; in this experiment, we focus on the works’ visual dimension but we do not want to reduce their presence and their ontological value to that alone.
We tried to make the book intelligible in the field of meanings the painters claim. We wanted the works to be seen as objects of intensity and affect that incite a response requiring serious attention, drawing the viewer into understanding something powerful and moving, eliciting from us, perhaps, something we don’t know?
But there was also something else in choosing to pursue the theme of the gift: to challenge the treatment of the paintings as simply commodities, for sale, and to render the participation of Western Desert painters in the contemporary art world on their own terms, to accept the complexity of the differences presented.
Terry Smith: Fred describes well the politics of the gift in play in this situation, as we strive to move (from Mauss to Fabian, you might say) towards a genuinely coeval exchange, one that embodies the qualities that should be present in all exchanges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, given the systemic inequities of colonisation. Last year, 60% voted against the proposal that the First People of Australia be acknowledged in our Constitution and permitted a formal Voice in the Parliament. This is racism in its most obdurate form. Does it evaporate in the clean-lined spaces of art museums, or in books about art, even those as elegant as this one?
For moments, perhaps, it can be reframed by what we might call the poetics of the gift. This emerges within response to paintings when evidence is gathered, when external knowledge, and rational inference has accounted for all it can, and inferred insight into form-making processes has exhausted itself. At that moment, paintings can retreat into rightful opacity. We were delighted that such moments occurred in our discussions. Right there, right then, the artists have called up the most valuable gift that we can offer in return: our capacity (if only partial, if incomplete, by necessity) for intuitive identification, for analytical insight, and, hopefully, for words that enable rather than block appreciation.
Jennifer Biddle: In the Introduction you mention a milestone exhibition in 2023, Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu (Past & Present Together): 50 Years of Papunya Tula Artists opening at the new Australian embassy in Washington, DC, including Fred, your editing of the exhibition catalogue with Henry Skerritt (Curator, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection) and the hosting in Washington of Papunya Tula artists at the Opening.
This framing strikes me as critical for this moment and what are now 37 community-based art centres across the Central and Western Desert (Desart Inc https://desart.com.au/member-art-centres/map/ ) in terms of the ways art production serves to sustain life lived-on county, in place; speaking and maintaining vernacular; the remote art economy; a history of community agency and mobilising force; of “vivification of Indigenous cultural modalities” as Gilchrist (2024:88) models in his Afterword, within ongoing colonial, extractive capitalism, neo-liberal and market-driven tendencies to commodify Aboriginal culture and identity. Could you speak to this 50-year history and the impact of the Western Desert art movement?
Fred Myers: The timing of our book with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Papunya Tula cooperative is significant. From my perspective as long-time observer and friend to the painters and Papunya Tula, this goes back to the art/ethnography binary; to not excising the artworks from their total place and meaning in the local tradition; that is part of their trajectory. And that trajectory is clear: the circulation (and sale) of these works has provided material support for people to live in their communities on country, has provided prestige and recognition for them as artists, which provides support in the public eye, and they provide recognition for Indigenous people and the significance of connections to land in the broader public imagination in the Australian national landscape. For Papunya Tula, the trajectory of self-determination as supported through artwork culminated in their creation of the Purple House, the Indigenous NGO that they built themselves to provide culturally sensitive dialysis based in remote communities. This has enabled patients to remain on country with kin and able to gain the health benefits of being close to community and to transmit knowledge to younger generations. As an anthropologist, I cannot help but look at the work of art as a practice, a form of activity and not just a piece of aesthetic activity – as the artists said to me, the paintings are not ngunytji, not just made up.
Terry Smith: Fred has just listed several value chains that were generated by the Papunya artists and sustained by them and their supporters for over fifty years—this duration is in itself remarkable when it comes to art movements. But it is not miraculous when we see how grounded it is in local community values and cosmologies, and how important the business of making and selling artworks is to sheer survival in circumstances, often, of severe scarcity.
The kinds of value embodied in these paintings, and activated as they circulate, cannot be reduced to the prices they generate on the art market. There are, in fact, several markets, operating simultaneously, each according to their quixotic logics. The most extreme generate headlines, especially when spectacular prices are reached, and instances of exploitation exposed, no surprise for commodity exchange under capitalist conditions. Yet all this, we would argue, is a sideshow to the core achievement of the artists: the extraordinary artistic and social values they create.
Fred hints at the wider social impact of art practices like that at Papunya, those that were contemporaneous at Yuendumu, at Ernabella and elsewhere, spreading to become the Desart Inc. network you describe in your question, having an impact on non-Indigenous Australians, especially those who take their sovereignty for granted. Powerful works such as The Aboriginal Memorial made by Ramingining elders as a counter-memorial during the 1988 Bicentennial Celebrations of White Settlement, and knock-out exhibitions such as Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius during the Sydney Olympics in 2000, joined countless other demonstrations of the Indigenous capacity for complex, subtle self-imagining. In the early 2000s, the movement as a whole, and desert painting in particular, was a major factor in advancing the agenda of national reconciliation. Meanwhile, Indigenous artists based in the major cities, problematizing White supremacy and imposed Indigeneity—I’m thinking of Gordon Bennett, Tracey Moffatt, and Daniel Boyd, amongst others—have been acknowledged as significant innovators within contemporary art, itself now an international phenomenon, especially in the biennials that continue to proliferate in cities worldwide. Archie Moore’s amazing installation kith and kin won the main prize at the Venice Biennale last year.
Indigenous artists have been at work within their communities, and between them and other communities, for millennia. Secret sacred material must remain the preserve of the initiated; protocols involved must be respected. As Stephen Gilchrist notes in his Afterword, Fred and I have done as best we can, with deep care. We have also, we hope, demonstrated that these paintings invite, and can sustain, detailed interpretation of a kind that draws on our disciplines, as much as it challenges them, requiring us to learn new ways of seeing. We believe this is true of much other art made by First Nations peoples in this country. Indigenous thinkers and scholars are leading this effort to fully value the output of their artists, past, present and emerging, and we hope that our conversation may prove useful to this great enterprise.
Shannon Ward: Your book deals centrally with the biopolitics of language oppression, charting how techniques of governance institutionalize the elimination of Manegacha. In Chapter 6, in particular, you show how biopolitics reaches into interpersonal relationships. I was struck, however, with the book’s opening scene, where a girl insists she understands her father’s Manegacha, and with the survey data you present that emphasizes the enduring significance of Manegacha to its speakers. Do you see any social spaces where the value of Manegacha is emphasized, perhaps subtly and even in response to efforts for elimination?
Gerald Roche: I think there are still a few social and physical spaces where the value of Manegacha is emphasized. These spaces are really important, because they essentially act as life rafts for the language. Unfortunately, I think they’re also decreasing. Here, I’ll just focus on one example of a physical space.
The most significant space for the language is the four villages where the majority of Manegacha speakers live. I think it’s important to emphasize that people choose to speak the language in those spaces, as a reflection of the values they expressed in the household surveys I conducted. Most adult Manegacha speakers today are at least bilingual, in Manegacha and the local variety of spoken Tibetan. Many of them also know some form of Mandarin as well. So, with the exception of some members of the eldest generation who really rely only on Manegacha to communicate with people, it would be possible for pretty much everyone in those villages to stop using Manegacha with each other, and to communicate only in other languages. I think we need to recognize this for the decision it is, and for the fact that people make it every day, in the context of immense pressure to eliminate Manegacha.
I’m not sure if resistance is the best word to use to describe this situation, however. Resistance, to me, implies a level of collective organization and an explicit oppositional stance of some sort, and I didn’t see much of either of these. So instead, I described that decision as a practice of endurance, taking the term from Elizabeth Povinelli’s work. Although I think that term works fine in the book, more recently I’ve been reading the social movement literature, and there are several useful terms there that apply equally well, such as Asef Bayat’s concept of a non-movement, or the anthropologist Julia Eckert’s concept of practice movements: “forms of unorganized, collective action, which are distinct from conventional social movements in various ways, first and foremost by their direct expression of goals in their practices.”
Villages provide a safe space for these practice movements, where Manegacha speakers have some relief from the relentless everyday discrimination they face from other Tibetans. Of course, those spaces don’t completely isolate the community from those pressures, and that’s why so many families are choosing to withhold Manegacha from their children now. But they do provide some relief. However, the villages are being swallowed up by the growth of a nearby town, and so those safe spaces are being dismantled. That’s partly what the image on the book’s cover shows us – how the presence of Manegacha speaking communities is erased by the construction of Tibetan space and identity.
Shannon Ward: You trace chronological changes from the mid-20th century, when Manegacha speakers used their language in a rich range of cultural practices, to the present, when dynamics of language oppression overdetermine speakers’ decisions to use Tibetan (or even Mandarin). In Chapter 5, for example, you describe how state-building has advanced elimination. Yet, there are possible worlds where Manegacha could have been included in state-building (pp. 116-117). In these pages, you assert that describing such possibilities helps to illuminate the violence of erasure. Are there instances, however, in which these possibilities are actively articulated or reflected on by Manegacha speakers? And, are there areas outside of the purview of the state where these possibilities could be actualized?
Gerald Roche: Manegacha speakers do articulate these sort of alternative possibilities – not necessarily the full range that I described, but there are examples.
One of the things that came up in my conversations with Manegacha speakers was a range of vernacular writing practices in the language. There’s no standard written form of the language encoded in textbooks or taught in formal contexts. But people in the community have repeatedly been motivated enough to develop their own systems to write the language and use it to communicate with small networks of friends. Some people use Tibetan script, some use Chinese characters, and others use the Roman alphabet.
Another example came from social media. When I started doing this research, just over ten years ago, smart phones and social media were still somewhat recent. There was a fair bit of enthusiasm among Manegacha speakers for making little media clips in the language: dubbing over a cartoon for example. I haven’t been able to see how this has developed since the growth of platforms like Tiktok, and it would be fascinating to see how Manegacha speakers are using that.
Anyway, in both cases, I think we see examples where people are motivated to try out pushing the language, at a very small scale, into spaces where it has been excluded from, such as formal education and mass media. If we take that together with the strong attachment to the language that I recorded in the household surveys, to me it raises an important question about how things could have been otherwise, under different conditions. Prompting the political imagination in those sort of ways not only helps bring to the forefront the current oppression that exists, which is what I try to do in the book, but it also hopefully helps create a sort of current where the practice movement amongst Manegacha speakers might grow to become something else.
Shannon Ward: In your writing, you made an active choice not to openly depict slurs against Manegacha and other minoritized language speakers, instead describing the general translations of these terms or representing them as slashes. Can you say more about how and why you made this decision in representation?
Gerald Roche: I thought about this in relation mostly to one particular term that is used to describe Manegacha speakers. It took a lot of time and reflection to come to the conclusion that the term was in fact a slur. When you are in a different social and cultural context, in a different language, problematic terms don’t always necessarily jump out at you as they would in more familiar circumstances, and that’s especially true when those terms are normalized in the local context, even by the people who are labelled with the slur.
Reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks really helped me think through how slurs work – the “crushing objecthood” that they impose on people. I also found Jane Hill’s writing on the topic in The Everyday Language of White Racismhelpful, as was some of Judith Butler’s writing, for example Excitable Speech. In the end I described a slur as a sort of ‘semiotic landmine’ that releases a sudden, harmful blast of negative associations and implications, and I think that’s a reasonable description of how this term works in practice.
Once I concluded that the term was a slur, the decision that I found myself faced with was – do I want to introduce this term into the English language? There are important debates to be had about how slurs in English can have complex social lives and sometimes allow for what Michael Hertzfeld called ‘cultural intimacy’: the use of sources of stigma to foster collective belonging. But the slur I was dealing with would be unknown to pretty much anyone reading the book, so why create knowledge of a harmful term where none existed, and run the risk that the harm of the term was amplified, showed up in new spaces, and so on? Similarly, I tried to imagine, while writing the book, how it would be read by someone from the Manegacha speaking community. Why go to the trouble of explaining how this everyday term is actually a slur, and then just repeatedly expose them to it? That seems callous to me.
In addition, I also think that eliding the term dramatizes it and gives the reader increased impetus for reflection. Because I do that explicitly, in a novel context, and because the absence of the term is visually striking, the reader is forced to slow down, and hopefully to consider their own stance on the politics of slurs.
Shannon Ward: In the Introduction and Conclusion, you write about the shift in your approach from endangerment linguistics (pp. 5-6) to one of decolonizing solidarity (pp. 154-156). What do you see as the role of language documentation and other traditional language revitalization tools in decolonizing solidarity?
Gerald Roche: The traditional suite of methods and techniques that have emerged in linguistics and allied fields since the late 1980s and the emergence of endangerment linguistics are not the most effective tools for bringing about the changes that are required to secure language rights and end language oppression. However, sometimes they are the only tools we have.
One reason that we have access to a limited toolkit is that most of our work is done at the behest of donors, whether private or public, and also requires some kind of institutional buy-in from a university. Shrinking funding pools and the neoliberalization of the university creates a bad environment for coming up with new ideas, but does create lots of incentives to tweak and redeploy existing tools. This set up also encourages people to use toolkits that seem, superficially apolitical, though of course they have their own politics.
A second reason why it is important to rely on this toolkit is that in large swathes of the world, basic civil and political rights do not exist. If they did, people would be more likely to already be agitating for the change they need, and our job would be to support that. But in China, for example, that’s not possible. So we can either abandon communities in those situations to state violence, or we find other ways to work with them. I think finding other ways is the right choice. So we take the superficially apolitical tools we have and do what we can with them in those contexts.
If we use them mindfully, those tools can help build decolonial solidarity in several ways. Maps, for example, are one way of countering hegemonic efforts to erase particular groups, such as Manegacha speakers. They help render visible what the state attempts to destroy, and create a permanent, public record that counteracts denial and diminishes impunity. Surveys provide a chance to counter harmful assumptions that facilitate assimilation, for example, the data I collected showing people’s deep attachment to their language contradicted victim-blaming narratives which suggested that the community simply didn’t care enough to maintain their own language. Finally, research activities also provide opportunities for the redistribution of material and symbolic resources, for example, I tried to make sure that I spent my research funding in ways that supported Manegacha speakers.
Shannon Ward: In the Conclusion, you draw a distinction between settler colonies and exploitation colonies (pp. 151-152). Do you see each of these contexts as lending itself to a particular form of decolonizing solidarity? That is, are there particular approaches to decolonization required in exploitation colonies that have not been adequately recognized or supported by scholars?
Gerald Roche: I think the debates around decolonization certainly have been patchy, though I’m not sure that the division necessarily lies along a divide between settler colonies and exploitation colonies. India is perhaps a good starting point to try and explain what I mean.
We have vast amounts of literature looking at India as a British exploitation colony, but discussion of India as a contemporary colonial state is less prominent, even though the relationship between the Indian state and Kashmir, the Adivasis, and the entire northeast (at least) are all classically colonial. Ethiopia is another good example. Before the modern nation-state of Ethiopia was formed, it was a classical colonial empire, with patches of settlement and exploitation, and yet a recent handbook on settler colonialism talked about Ethiopia only in terms of its invasion by Italian fascists, and much of the analysis of the recent Tigray war elided the roots of the conflict in Ethiopian empire building.
As these two brief examples hopefully suggest, we tend to take colonization as a sort of vanity project that only Westerners can engage in. If anyone else is doing it, then it’s just domination, or even worse, putatively national liberation. This is certainly part of the reason why the colonial relation between China and Tibet remains so under-analyzed.
On the other hand, when people do analyze Tibet as a colonial situation, there is a tendency to simply apply models of what happened in Canada, or Australia, or the USA. Instead of denying the colonial relationship, we erase its specificities. So, for example, although I think settler colonialism plays a role in Tibet, I think we need to look at how settlement by Han people is part of a broader, and unique, colonial strategy in Tibet.
Understanding the specificities of different sites and systems of oppression is essential to building thick solidarity as I discuss in the book’s conclusion. Refusing to impose historical and analytical templates developed in the Australia or the USA is also essential to building decolonial solidarity. Ultimately, I want the book to contribute to dismantling systems of language oppression that Manegacha speakers face. We can’t do that by cutting and pasting tactics and concepts from other places. Our solidarity requires us to do the work of understanding what we are actually trying to change.
Chip Zuckerman: Thank you, John, for engaging with me about your new book. I should start by telling readers that we went to graduate school together and have swapped many things over the years. This means that by the time your book reached my house, I had already seen most of it in one form or another. (In a co-authored article, we even wrote together about some of its materials (Zuckerman and Mathias 2022)!) But all these years later, while you might think this familiarity would make the book feel like an old hat arriving in the mail, I felt the opposite. It has been so satisfying to see its once rough and drafty parts coalesce and elevate into this single, polished, and fresh piece.
The book, for those yet to encounter it, traces the stories of activists in Kerala, India to probe a recognizable ethical dilemma: how can one live for what one thinks is right when other people, including people we love, get in the way? With that, let me start my questions with a question about the book’s style of writing.
The book is written beautifully. This makes it something one can sit down with and comfortably dive into. It also means it will be an excellent teaching text, which foregrounds the stories of particular people. But good writing takes work and sacrifice: you surely trimmed some prized detail, omitted some theoretical tangles not directly on your story’s path, and killed at least a handful of darlings. Can you tell me about your choice to write Uncommon Cause as you did?
John Mathias: Partly, I think the book’s story-based style just came naturally to me; it’s connected with how I think and the nature of my fieldwork style. When I was in the field, my notes came to focus on puzzles or questions that the people I was spending time with were asking—puzzles about the difficulty of mediatizing and circulating evidence of what people experienced as smelly pollution, for example, or about the paradoxical importance of fighting for the people to activists who actively distinguished themselves from what they saw as common or ordinary people. As the months went by, I watched people work through these puzzles in various ways. Not that they necessarily resolved them; sometimes they seemed to become more lost or trapped in them. But by watching how their stories unfolded, I could learn something about how the puzzle was structured and why it was puzzling,g so to speak. So many of the stories in the book were already there—in my fieldnotes but also on my mind—when I began writing.
Later in the writing process, as you suggest, I also foregrounded the stories deliberately. This was part of choosing an audience and a rhetorical angle. On audience, I wanted the book to speak to a broad readership, beyond academia, and I thought that leading with stories, rather than the literature, would do that best. As I went, I found myself less interested in whether my readers could place a particular puzzle within scholarly debates; it was more important that they could place them alongside their own experiences. I wanted them to feel the puzzles as real—to feel inspired by what inspired the activists in the book, to feel trapped when they felt trapped. And I hoped that these feelings would resonate with readers’ own experiences of desiring to live for some larger purpose or of fearing that such a purpose, if strongly held, might alienate them from their family and friends. My long-running writing group also encouraged me to lean into this, and as I wrote and revised, I deliberately elaborated on the stories of particular activists while putting much of the engagement with other scholars into the book’s subtext and footnotes.
Rhetorically, this also seemed the right tack. The book is deeply moral, but not moralizing. The activists I describe ask questions about how people ought to live; and the book, in its own way, pursues those same questions. But it does not offer any overriding answer or program for how to live; I do not, for example, make the case that we should all be more like activists. The activists in the book often disagreed about the best kind of life, after all, and their stories are full of uncertainty and contradiction. But people can learn from stories even when those stories do not have clear lessons or morals, or even satisfying endings. Stories can offer a chance to sort of feel out the stakes in another form of life from the inside—and, ideally, to appreciate how these stakes could be relevant to our own lives. In this way, stories are good for thinking through real moral dilemmas, the resolution of which (as Wittgenstein suggests) cannot be reduced to any abstract formula but must be worked out within particular circumstances and relationships.
Chip Zuckerman: In part because the book is written so accessibly, it eschews some of the in-the-weeds discussion of how its arguments relate to the anthropology of ethics, a turn that really got going leading up to and during your fieldwork. I know that you were steeped in this stuff in graduate school, because I was steeped right alongside you. Can you tell me a bit more about how you see your central argument relating to some of the big pushes in the anthropology of ethics? For instance, how does your argument relate to Laidlaw’s (2002) early argument about the need for an account of freedom, or the critique of Durkheim’s effort to make “the moral congruent with the social,” as Zigon (2007:132) put it?
John Mathias: You’re right that I was deep in this literature as I was getting into fieldwork, and it shaped my interests. One thing that drew me to study environmental activists in Kerala is that some of them (especially the more radical environmentalists that I caption as solidarity activists in the book) seemed deeply committed to principles of moral freedom and practices of critical reflection. In some sense, they took an ethics of freedom to one possible extreme: they sought to break free from the norms of their inherited communities and practice a more liberated and rational mode of ethics. So I wanted to understand what happens when people try to do that.
I think the book still presents that story. But as I dug deeper, I also found that some of the founding contrasts of the ethical turn, especially the critique of Durkheim, seemed to take one side in a debate that I was seeing worked out, and never fully won, on the ground. The emphasis in much of that work on freedom, for instance, did align closely with how some activists described their own lives, but the more time I spent with those activists, the more I saw how difficult distinctions between freedom and unfreedom, or between critical and uncritical, were for them to sustain in practice. More to the point, there was a whole subset of activists (those I call locals in the book) who seemed to see their activism in a much different way—not as a break with norms and social groups, but rather as grounded in belonging to communities. One could say, superficially, that these activists exemplified a Durkheimian approach to ethics rather than a late-Foucauldian approach, but that dichotomy would not do justice to the many ways that the stakes in solidarity activism and local activism overlapped. Ultimately, I came to see that, while the freedom/unfreedom opposition (what some caption as a distinction between“ethics and socially-enforced morality) resonated with how some activists’ described their lives, to adopt this opposition as an analytic would be to favor some ways of doing activism over others—and, moreover, to perpetuate some Western ideologies about the centrality of individual freedom and impartiality to ethics. The light the distinction threw was not worth the shadows it cast.
My distinction between living for and living from is an attempt to better capture these dynamics, whether they unfold on the streets of Kerala or on the pages of journals like Anthropological Theory and JRAI. I understand living for and living from as distinct aspects of ethical life, which can come into tension. But they are neither inherently opposed nor fundamentally aligned—their opposition or alignment is produced by the ideologies and reflexive practices of actual people, working to oppose or align them. I find a metaphor from sailing helpful: like current and wind, they can flow together or against one another, but navigating ethical life is a matter of contending with both at once.
Chip Zuckerman: You write: “[t]he quandaries that define the struggle for environmental justice in Kerala are rooted in dilemmas we all face. Each form of activist life speaks to tensions in the form of human life” (pg. 3). And in a few other moments in the book, you return to this point, arguing that the central problem that activists face—and the central problem of the book—is relevant to us all. Can you talk a bit about this, how do you see the relation between the activist form of life and human life more generally?
John Mathias: What I mean by this is, most concretely, that everyone sometimes faces dilemmas that look something like the dilemmas these activists face. Not every life is defined, as some activists’ are, by choices between radical norm-breaking and community belonging—for example, facing potential estrangement from one’s family over one’s commitment to marrying across caste. But we all experience some version of this at some point—whether to take the side of a bullied classmate and risk being ostracized oneself; whether to keep going to mosque in college; whether to reveal, over Thanksgiving turkey, that one has become vegan.
All of these experiences are rooted in the entanglement of relationships and ethics—in the reality that ethics is, inevitably, a way of relating to other people. Yet they are troubling experiences because ethics is not simply another word for social connectedness; ethics combines living for and living from, and these two aspects of ethics can conflict, even for those who work hard to keep them aligned. In that sense, the book suggests that at least some tension between the two aspects is inevitable.
The ubiquity of this tension is not, however, what I want to underline. On the contrary, my more far-reaching point is that living for and living from are not inherently opposed. I want to push back against those who overstate the tension. To see what I mean, think, for instance, of the longstanding tendency in Western moral philosophy to purify ethics of living from, under the rubric of impartiality. Environmental ethics, in its challenge to anthropocentrism, has been seen by some as an extreme (and laudable) form of this push for impartiality. Debates about anthropocentrism have largely focused on how non-humans should be valued by humans. I intervene in those debates, in part, by asking not about values but about practices of evaluating—by studying ethics in action. Studying environmentalists ethnographically, it was clear that even highly eco-centric ethics was largely a matter of navigating relationships with other people (and, in the case of some religious activists, relationships with non-human evaluators). Even when people sought to uproot their values from any grounding in particular groups (their families, their castes, their species, their planet, and so on), they enacted this project by breaking with some people and forming community with others. In this sense, relationships between humans remain central to environmental ethics.
Chip Zuckerman: In chapter’s 3, 4, and the conclusion you draw parallels between DuBois’s (2007) notion of the “stance triangle” and the dilemmas that activists face. Here is a reproduction of that stance triangle for those unfamiliar:
I think this analogy is powerful. But getting meta, your use of the analogy also bears a familiar shape. The shape is this: the details of a semiotic and/or more narrowly linguistic process become a model for some more general (and temporally dispersed) pattern of culture. We could think, for instance, of Levi-Strauss’s (1963) use of Troubetzkoy’s and Jakobson’s structuralism to talk not about the sounds of language, but about culture generally, or the more recent use of the phatic function to characterize patterns of sociality and their roles as infrastructure (Elyachar 2010), or the notion of the “subjunctive” to characterize a kind of politics (Ahmann 2019). This is a giant question, too giant for this kind of conversation, but I cannot resist asking what you think of this analogic shape, and more generally, the relation between the stance triangle as a way of characterizing a particular semiotic moment, on the one hand, and its use here to understand a more enduring emphasis someone might have—for instance, someone might emphasize attending to their relations with others (the alignment line in the triangle) over and against their commitment to a value (the evaluation line in the triangle)?
John Mathias: This is a big question. I’d start by underlining that, as you suggest, the book does not aim to show perduring patterns in activist stance taking—for example, by tracking the prevalence of alignment in evaluative acts. This would be a really interesting project, but it was not mine. I did, however, record quite a bit of interaction in the field. Carefully transcribing some of these recordings was important to studying ethics as an activity. But the transition from alignment of utterances to alignment of lives was more about understanding activists’ ideologies about how ethical evaluation should work.
By diagramming the interdependence of the intersubjective (subject-subject) and evaluative (subject-object) aspects of ethics, the triangle offered a way to think through how this interdependence became problematic in activism. It captured a core moral problem for some activists: how to free their lives from the influence of social ties, to live only for their causes. It also helped to describe a contrasting approach to activism, in which cause should come from community. More generally, it helped to think through questions about how to balance the desire to stand for what one believes, regardless of what others think (arguably the hallmark of an activist ethics), with the desire for community belonging, which might be considered morally valuable in its own right.
It is also worth noting that the parallel you point to is arguably already present in DuBois’ article, insofar as he speaks of degrees of alignment not only of subject positions in specific stance acts but also as a property of speakers in conversation. To wit, he defines alignment as “the calibrating relationship between two stances, and by implication two stancetakers” (2007, 144). Much rests on “implication” here, of course, and in my reading it is not clear to what extent DuBois thinks of the triangle as a tool for analyzing not only stance acts but also the diachronic positioning of participants—let alone such extended modes of stance-taking as the living of an activist life. But I found the triangle valuable for the latter mode of analysis because it clarified the defining stakes, for my interlocutors, in what it meant to be an activist.
And it did so in a way that made the condition I noted above—that ethics is a way of relating to others—visually apparent. Many have reflected on this condition, of course; Adam Smith, Erving Goffman, and Judith Butler are a few others I looked to. But the stance triangle version of this argument has that helpful combination of being both very abstract and very easy to grasp.
Chip Zuckerman: Your book takes you in a variety of interesting theoretical and empirical directions. For this final question, I wonder if you could give us all a sense of one path you chose not to take. What was left out, and is what you left on the cutting board for this book shaping what is to come for you?
John Mathias: As I was writing the book, I kept bumping up against the boundaries of ethics as a category. Especially, I thought a lot about activist discourse about self-interest, which for those I studied and for many moral philosophers is seen as a kind of defining opposition for ethics. In the book, I question the interests/values dichotomy both in activist discourse and in some anthropology and philosophy. And this, in turn, led me to think about the utility of the category of ethics itself; I settled on motive as a broader domain within which one could inquire about interests, values, and other notions of what makes people do what they do.
Motive is so core to theories of social life, yet we lack rigorous engagement with theories of motive in anthropology. Given the overwhelming emphasis of current anthropological analysis on motion—on practices, processes, social action, and so on—it seems we need to look more carefully at the motives driving the motion. So lately I’ve been thinking about how anthropological inquiry can more explicitly and rigorously explore motives. With the support of a Wenner Gren grant, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with some really brilliant minds on that (yours included, Chip!), and I am looking forward to publishing on it in the next year or two.
Empirically and methodologically, I’m excited about some new directions as well. As climate change has transformed environmental politics, I’ve become concerned with how we think about long-term futures. I’ve recently done some more applied, community-engaged work related to climate change in the US, and I’ve noticed how this genre of research tends to focus on relatively short-term problems even as we recognize that the temporal scale of climate change is vast. Some of the activists I write about in the book have noticed a similar pattern. For example, coastal fishing populations in Kerala are protesting various government efforts to relocate them, which are put forward as a way of preparing for sea level rise (that is, climate adaptation) but will also make way for a planned coastal highway. The protests are aimed at stopping the highway in the short term, but they also respond to a vision of the future that excludes fishers. There is a need to include fishers in re-imagining what long-term climate futures should look like. So now I am planning some community-engaged research in Kerala that will be less reactive and more open-ended and imaginative. My love of stories is part of this. I’d like to collaborate with members of the fishing community, and we have been discussing the possibility of writing speculative fiction together. The project itself only exists in our imaginations for now, so I won’t say too much. But stay tuned, I guess, and thanks again for engaging the book.
Work Cited
Ahmann, Chloe 2019 “Waste to Energy: Garbage Prospects and Subjunctive Politics in Late-Industrial Baltimore.” American Ethnologist 46(3): 328–342.
Du Bois, John W. 2007 “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Robert Englebretson, ed. Pp. 139–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Elyachar, Julia 2010 “Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of Empowerment in Cairo.” American Ethnologist 37(3): 452–464.
Laidlaw, James 2002 “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311–332.
Levi-Strauss, Claude 1963 Structural Anthropology. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, trans. New York: Basic Books.
Zigon, Jarrett 2007 “Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities.” Anthropological Theory 7: 131–50.
Zuckerman, Charles H. P., and John Mathias 2022 “The Limits of Bodies: Gatherings and the Problem of Collective Presence.” American Anthropologist 124: 345–357.
Priya M. Dabak: This book is divided into two parts, The Nouns and The Verbs. First, “The Nouns” explores the political economy of language in education and the second part, “The Verbs” looks at socialization. This division serves as a metaphorical framework for exploring the complex relationship between language, language ideologies, and social capital across various research sites. Could you elaborate on how this structure enhances the analysis of language and social capital in urban middle-class settings, and discuss why you decided on these names for the two parts?
Jessica Chandras: First, thank you for engaging with the book and for wanting to talk with me about it. To this first question, I liked the play on grammar. The first half of the book does more heavy theorizing and sets the stage for the second half of the book, where I put the theory in motion, hence Verbs. What the structure does is mirror how I was working out cultural complexities myself, complexities like being in a new education system, and experiencing and watching the power of language ideologies. In the first half of the book, I dig more into identity as well, including my own. As the book progresses, I wanted the later chapters to put everything into action in classroom discourse. I loved getting into nitty-gritty linguistic analysis to be able to show the specific embodiments of linguistic capital that strings educational aspirations along and say, “See right there. That’s how upper caste, hegemonic norms are reproduced.”
Priya M. Dabak: Your book explores the intersection of English education and social dynamics in India, a topic that has been extensively researched. However, you’ve taken a unique approach by connecting it to caste structures. What gaps in the existing literature did you identify that led you to explore this particular angle?
Jessica Chandras: This book builds on my dissertation research. I wrote my dissertation mostly on code switching and language ideologies and analyzed how identity in my research context was shaped broadly. But when I returned to my dissertation to start the work of transforming it into a book, I realized there was so much about caste that I had not analyzed before. It is such a personal and heavy topic, that I wasn’t ready to put myself in that conversation yet for my dissertation. When I was ready, though, I searched for studies about caste and language beyond English education in India. And there’s this great term coined by a professor in India named Dr. P. M. Girish: ‘castlect.’ He explored ways of speaking connected to caste by looking at politeness in Malayalam as a tool for reproducing caste structures and divisions. So I saw a lot of parallels in his work and my interests. Also, there are many scholars who explore how English is a tool for the liberation of students from low castes and socioeconomic classes. I saw where I could contribute something because I wasn’t finding answers about the role of non-English languages used by upper-castes. And this guided me to ask what are upper caste groups doing with their mother tongues or non-English languages to continue caste divisions in education?
Priya M. Dabak: You’ve discussed how this book evolved from your doctoral dissertation, a process that often involves significant refinement and adaptation. Could you take us through the journey of transforming your PhD dissertation into this manuscript? What were the key challenges and opportunities you encountered in this transition? Specifically, I’m curious about how the central argument and focus of your work may have shifted or deepened.
Jessica Chandras: In the last question I explained how I shifted my dissertation on identity to specifically focus on caste. But there were a lot of other transformations too. Another really big shift was theorizing code switching to translanguaging, which, at the end of my PhD, was still a new concept for me and there wasn’t as much writing as there is now on translanguaging in the South Asian context. But again, putting the dissertation away for a year and then going back to it, I saw new things, and analyzing my data through the lens of translanguaging broadened my scope of analysis. So I took a broader perspective of linguistic economies in classrooms through translanguaging. It was important that I wasn’t just swapping out one word for a buzzword too. To do my due diligence to analyze translanguaging in an Indian context, I changed the scale of my analysis to look at the full linguistic repertoires used by teachers and students in classrooms. And I was already looking at socialization, so translanguaging really enriched my focus on the ongoing process of meaning making and moving beyond understanding languages as a bound entity to see how those repertoires were then part of the socialization process.
Priya M. Dabak: So did translanguaging become another lens for your analysis or had you always viewed it from that lens but did not yet use the term translanguaging or see it as that concept?
Jessica Chandras: Translanguaging was definitely a new and different lens, but code switching got me there.
Priya M. Dabak: The methodological approach in this study is notably expansive for an anthropologist of education. Here, you’ve cast a wide net by examining multiple schools across various educational levels, which diverges from the more conventional anthropological or educational research that typically focuses on a single location or age group. How did the study take its shape in this way? Why did you decide on bringing in data and examples from such different schools to make your argument that “multilingual practices in education cultivate hierarchies in social structures” (p. 4)? And were there particular challenges or insights that emerged from comparing such diverse educational settings?
Jessica Chandras: Looking back, I gave myself a huge challenge. I was so curious and got interested in seeing how socialization through language played out differently in different schools. Each school I visited had a unique culture and such different student demographics. As I narrowed my search for schools I realized I wanted to focus on middle class students. I was really inspired by the work of Leela Fernandes and Sarah Dickey about the middle class as I shaped my dissertation topic. It was like finding the right balance as I continued to shape my research focus and questions and figuring this out took a while. I had to also consider where I had access and what that access looked and felt like. My entry point, though, was through college students. So that’s why I ended up working first on higher education. Since I was a graduate student I met other graduate students and started asking them, “Can I talk to your teachers? Can I talk to you and your peers about language?” As I was learning Marathi too, and in India where higher education is supposed to be completely in English, going to college classes held in English was a way I could understand what was going on in classrooms to learn about education at the beginning of my research. So, I took this top down approach starting with college students who I saw to have these fully formed academic and linguistic identities. I was curious to see how they got there. I started visiting primary schools and was fascinated by how the youngest children started their academic careers. Another reason why I started off so broadly was because I really wanted to do an ethnographic study of the city of Pune, and to look at how language is an aspect of societal culture. With that in mind, it didn’t feel appropriate to then focus on only one school if I was trying to generalize my arguments to describe the larger city too. Focusing on one school wouldn’t have answered my questions about Pune and linguistic capital and value systems across the city, but it may have made my life easier! Ultimately for the book I’m glad I could draw on examples framed by such different contexts.
Priya M. Dabak: You describe the complexities that categories like caste, class, and rurality bring to the linguistic identity formations and hierarchies in education. In what ways do educational institutions contribute to and reinforce caste-based ideologies through institutional autonomy and specific pedagogical philosophies? In terms of your focus on education as well, how did your own positionality as a heritage language learner manifest in your ethnographic engagement in this research topic? How did you negotiate this interplay of the linguistic expectations with your interlocutors during your fieldwork?
Jessica Chandras: The first thing that came to mind is how narrow the goals of education are. In Indian culture, teachers are regarded very highly. What was reinforced then, was that students should aspire to be educated like their teachers. So an ingrained pedagogical philosophy from teachers, who for the most part were all from the same background in my study, was that to be a good student was to be like them. Going to the second part of that question of how my position as a heritage language learner helped me to see some of this, and negotiate through this– I realized that I was learning culture as I was learning Marathi. And I thought, “Oh, this is really affecting me.” As I learned Marathi, I thought I would have more access throughout the city, but it actually closed a lot of doors and the city became more limited for me as I learned the hierarchies that are very rigid through learning the Marathi I was expected to learn. Then, when I began collecting data I approached people as a Marathi learner wanting to know about their feelings of a sense of belonging through Marathi, because that’s what I was looking for too.
On the other hand, I went into classrooms and was granted an elevated level of authority commensurate with my level of English, which was completely unearned and unfounded. I was granted access to schools as an American “expert” and as a heritage speaker. My turn to focus on caste came through this as well because I was automatically implicated within high caste and Brahmin networks due to my language studies and background. In the book, I’m very open about my positionality and experience figuring all this out, so much so that I didn’t realize I was doing some autoethnography at first. But I can’t ignore the way my own personal connections to this topic granted me a framework within which to study it.
This interview took place on Zoom rather than email, and has been edited to reflect our vibrant conversation
Bridget Bradley: Having followed your work over the years, and in waiting patiently for the publication of Disability Worlds, I really loved how this book culminates almost two decades of fieldwork while also weaving in your own personal stories. It is beautifully curated, and simultaneously celebrates how people with disabilities are living otherwise in the United States, while reinforcing the importance of making disability count through empowering stories of disability justice and world-making.
Faye Ginsburg: Thank you so much Bridget! In the book, wesituated our disabled children’s lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists who are part of the disability worlds that they traversed. We wanted to show how disability consciousness emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions.
Rayna Rapp: Our chapters address dilemmas of genetic testing and neuroscientific research, the ways that kinship and community are reimagined, the challenges of special education, and the perils of transitioning from high school, what many call “the disability cliff.” We also address the vitality of neurodiversity activism, disability arts, politics, and public culture. Our fieldwork with diverse disabled New Yorkers and their allies reveals the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures.
Bridget Bradley: I am keen to hear some of your reflections on the process of working, writing and raising children alongside each other over the years. How have you managed to intertwine your lives and research so successfully?
Faye: It is joyful for us; but we are very, very fortunate to have our collaboration.
Rayna: How did it start? So I gave a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1982. Faye was a doctoral student there and I was an Assistant Professor at the New School, and we started talking…
Faye: …and Rayna became an outside reader in 1986 on my thesis on abortion activists and then we just kept working together.
Rayna: We started to think about the way in which gender and reproduction were being transformed comparatively across the globe. And by the time we edited the book Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction in 1995, we were very firmly committed to working together.
Faye: Then Rayna started doing her research on amniocentesis, and I was pregnant. So, I volunteered myself as a research subject.
Rayna: And we were seeing the connections. You [Faye] are working on abortion. I’m working on genetic testing and prenatal technology. And then Faye’s daughter Sam is born in 1989 with this mysterious set of symptoms, and we just kept in a constant conversation as Faye and Fred (her husband, anthropologist Fred Myers) had to figure out how to enable their daughter to both be diagnosed and flourish.
Faye: And because by then we were very close friends, our families were very connected from the beginning, from the birth of Sam who had a rare degenerative Jewish genetic disease, Familial Dysautonomia, and then later Rayna’s son, Teo was born…
Rayna: …who had a mild disability, dyslexia. It kept the conversation going about how to deal with the bureaucracy of special education, and all the injustices our disabled kids experienced, whether they were microaggressions, bullying, or the way in which children who are different are excluded from so many public events and venues; their lives are not necessarily cherished or valued by the larger community.
Faye: Rayna was looking at the early days of genetic testing; disability was inherently part of that conversation, which wasn’t always being addressed in the research going on in reproduction. And then, of course, Sam’s birth, at a time when there was no genetic testing available for her condition, very dramatically signalled that there was something I needed to understand about her difference, and Rayna was by my side.
Rayna: We didn’t think of it as doing autoethnography, but we were already launched on that path.
Faye: We were in constant conversation, and because it was about our familial lives and our intellectual lives, and increasingly, disability worlds, the discussions were pretty seamlessly interconnected. We just really love thinking, researching and writing together, and because we’ve done it now for such a long time…
Rayna: …we just finish each other’s sentences! We fight about semicolons and writing shorter sentences!! People think there’s some deep psychological meaning to our relationship. Actually, it’s all about editing [laughter].
Faye: We know a lot of people who work together who alternate writing: “You do Chapter One, I’ll do Chapter Two”, but we just sat down together from the beginning and wrote everything together.
Rayna: …and we don’t know why but we just started writing, and we’re always in this office, which means only Faye can type because she uses a trackball mouse that I can’t use. So, we have to talk, and I have to peer at the screen, and she always knows if I’m getting upset about something she’s putting on the keyboard because I stand up and I go closer to the screen! [laughs]
Faye: She’s very small. She has to stand up [laughter]. So we’re very comfortable writing together, plus we’ve experienced so many of these things together that we write about in the book. It would be more efficient if we said, you do Chapter One, and I’ll do Chapter Two. But we just wouldn’t know how to work that way.
Rayna: Right. Now we have a shared archive. I mean, we’ve done so many interviews together that when we do them apart, we know how to think about each other’s responses. And that’s part of a long relationship.
Faye: There are parts of the book where Rayna did more of the research or I did more of the research… But we have just combined everything in the book
Rayna: …because, as we often said, we don’t know where one brain ends and the other begins.
Bridget: Disability Worlds is an incredibly accessible book, that will appeal to a wide range of readers including disability scholars, activists, and allies. In particular, one of the book’s main theoretical contributions is the notion of “new kinship imaginaries”, which speaks directly to families navigating disability worlds.
When writing the book, who did you find yourself writing for? What decisions did you make in order to increase its accessibility or appeal to different audiences?
Faye: Initially, we weren’t sure if we were going to do a book. And then we realized that we’d like our work to have that presence, to be both an anthropology and a disability studies book. We are allies to our children and the disability community. We are parents of disabled kids. People respect us for the fact that we support our children and try to find and make opportunities for them and many of their peers. But it was so important that we had been building a presence for disability studies and disability, arts and justice at our university, NYU, where we created a Center for Disability Studies. We really wrote the book with the disability community—including our kids – reading over our shoulders, having a conversation with us. And we’re super aware that we had to earn our credibility, and we have to continue to earn it. We’re waiting to see what the reviews are!!
Rayna: I think it will unfurl over the next few months, and even years to see how the book makes its way in both the disability studies and the anthropology audiences, and whether it has a life. We were delighted that you thought the book was accessible. We hope the book is accessible. But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to become a runaway hit bestseller. We’re just hoping that there will be a kind of network of sites, some of which we have some ability to enter, and some of which will just have to organically flower on their own, where people may come to appreciate the complexity of both what we’re writing about and what they might learn and contribute to it as well.
Faye: We thought about writing a book that jumped the fence into a more popular idiom and didn’t necessarily have as much academic language in it. Or we could have written about things like kinship in a more anthropologically theoretical way; it was really important to us to be accessible. You know many people have now read the book who don’t work in academia, and who have disabled children, or are disability activists/allies, and the book seems to have really resonated with them. But at the same time, we wanted it to speak to anthropology, and connect to the broader disability community.
Rayna: Absolutely! We continue to hope that anthropology will change and recognize the significance of disability –a fundamental form of human difference — to our field. And, it IS changing. Good things are happening but there is an ongoing struggle for recognition of this area. It is important to us that this be in a language and in a set of familiar research categories for anthropologists who might read the book and say – “Oh, this belongs in my introductory course”, or “Oh, this belongs in my course on the arts”. It had to be available in the categories that anthropology recognizes because the discipline sure has had a hard time recognizing the value of the category of disability.
Faye: One of the reasons we kept Disability Worlds for our title is because we were very struck, as you have been in your research, Bridget, by the incredible world-making activity we kept witnessing in the disability community. Once you have recognized that you been endowed with this label – disabled – for better or worse, people recognize, what some have called “crip kinship”. But these forms of community have been under-recognized. The book shows how people find ways to do the world-making that enables them to move beyond the sense of difference and stigma to being part of a community that is insistent on creativity and justice, and telling their stories from their point of view.
Bridget: Many of the people who you feature in this book are well-known disability activists, allies and artists. Likewise, some of the scholars you theorise with are also activists, and so the book offers a vast collection of recommended people and resources to explore, including films, documentaries, theatre shows, and books – all of which would enhance teaching on disability. The book also describes the innovative approaches to education you witnessed during fieldwork, and the inspiring examples of inclusive teaching environments for young people and adults with learning and sensory differences. While you do mention some of the resistance you have received from colleagues in response to your efforts to make academic learning more inclusive, I wonder if you have been able to introduce some of these innovative approaches when teaching Disability Worlds at NYU? In other words, what are essential adjustments we can bring to our classrooms in order to do justice to teaching and learning about disability in higher education?
Faye: The first essential adjustment is that we recognize that our students know so much. They’ve been born into a world that didn’t exist for us. We were born before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, while contemporary disabled young people and their allies have experienced support and educational opportunities in ways that were not available in our generation. And they bring so much more awareness and experience to class; they teach each other and they teach us. We use ethnographies by disabled scholars which are going to really engage our students, for example work by Michele Friedner, Karen Nakamura, Arseli Dokumaci and other fantastic scholars. Whenever possible, we invite these authors to zoom into our classes so the students have an opportunity to talk to them.
Rayna: And that is a way of saying this is a new way of doing anthropology. Pay attention. And yes, it’s disability studies. But it’s also a new way of thinking about ethnography.
Faye: You learn that in an undergraduate class there are going to be people in their power chairs, along with others who have very visible issues. Those students usually are strong activists by the time they’re in college. But then you learn all these other things, all the invisible disabilities that people are struggling with, especially when they are coming from a range of cultural backgrounds. Some are coming out to one another for the first time, and they offer one another a lot of remarkable support.
Rayna: But there is something else that happens in those undergraduate classes which we started calling the “pedagogy of the chat box” during Covid. They support one another, and they come to have very enduring relationships amongst themselves, which we see in the ways that they use the chatbox on Zoom.
Bridget: Finally, the book’s introduction addresses the inherent ableism in anthropology, and slow but significant work being done to foreground disability within the discipline. You also mention the potential of an engaged anthropology that embraces participant observation (or in your case “observant participation”) in order to capture the way research and activism intersect. I appreciate this powerful endorsement for anthropologists to combine autoethnography or deep reflexivity with non-extractive research collaborations, and you clearly demonstrate the incredible impact that can emerge from these methodological and ethical choices. What further developments would you like to see for the future of anthropology and disability studies? And what advice would you give to those of us attempting to use our own lived experiences to bridge the research/activism nexus?
Faye: When we started this work many years ago, we thought, where is disability in anthropology? And even though there were some fantastic pioneering folks who did some really important door-opening books and conversations which we wrote about in an Annual Review essay in 2013…
Rayna: …there was a bias against it. And I think there still is.
Faye: I think it’s getting better…
Rayna: …but it’s still a struggle, even more than it is in some neighboring or adjacent fields.
Faye: So, despite the ongoing commitments to social justice, movements, and other things that have emerged in anthropology, disability has been very slow to have a presence in our discipline, which is still very ableist. We understand that this form of difference – disability — is fundamental to the human condition and yet is still not sufficiently acknowledged. And we are also trying our best to avoid the sin of extractivism; that is really a big issue. When you are doing autoethnography, your stakes are very much on the table. You are pulling that information from yourself and from, in our case, our children and the many disability worlds we learned about with them, and with their permission.
Rayna: It starts long ago, in the history of anthropology, the colonial critique has evolved into understanding the problem of extractivism, and insisting that you be reflexive about your own position and what you both contribute and take out of the work you do with others. For us, our roots in feminist anthropology were so important. That’s really what brought us together in the first place. All of that was part of reflecting on our own lives and the politics of what was going on around us, and being porous to those critiques rather than to some kind of defensive upholding of the expertise of anthropology. That’s an ongoing struggle that goes on. It’s not done, and that’s part of where we are now, bringing that kind of reflection into this conversation. To answer your question, I’ll say something very banal, which is: you end up planting where you live. You have to make the institutional change, whatever the struggle, exactly where your workplace, your community and your family are.
Faye: And it demands action. We’re at a university. We’re doing disability studies. There are no ramps in half the buildings where they are needed (as one of many examples). So we started a committee to change the accessibility of the campus. It’s an extension of the activism that we embrace. It’s very hard to write about this without looking around and saying, “Oh, my student using a wheelchair can’t get into my office. How do we fix that?”
Rayna: This is not a theoretical question. The institution which provided you with shelter also needs to be critiqued and transformed. That’s true within the AAA and it’s true within the university and wherever it is that you are investing your life’s energy. So that’s the kind of knowledge that we have learned really goes right back into the world – to disability worlds — in a variety of ways.
Hyemin Lee: Your book wonderfully illustrates the encounters between globally dominant socialization ideologies and the local socialization landscapes in South Korea, paying particular attention to the moments of tension, conflict, and confusion in everyday preschool classroom settings. Your argument and findings are significant for developing and enhancing current educational policies, curricula, and pedagogical approaches in the South Korean context. I am curious how your book and findings inform us about South Korean education and society.
Junehui Ahn: Thank you for the opportunity to share my findings about early childhood education and socialization in South Korea. To begin, I’d like to briefly relate the experience of one passionate and well-intended teacher I met at Somang preschool (my research site). At start of school year, Ms. Choo and her colleagues eagerly pursued globally dominant socialization ideals by implementing the Reggio approach (an Italian curriculum). As the year passed, she became increasingly fatigued and frustrated when they all failed to attain their initial goals. By year’s end, Ms. Choo expressed a dream of “being an old teacher who has just spent many, many years with children,” not one “who makes fancy posters and documents children’s play.” Why had she become so frustrated and pessimistic about her job in just one year?
My research revealed that teachers’ seeming failure to achieve global ideals and their fatigue and frustration stemmed mainly from the gap between global ideals and local implicit values as well as the inevitable conflicts and contradictions this gap brings into the socialization sphere. If global imports cause conflict and confusion on a local level, this suggests a need to be wary of and vigilant against the assumption of global ideals as necessary for what is viewed as good, quality education. I’ve seen many instances where teachers and children collaboratively contrive their own indigenized models that are not simple copies of imposed global imports but are, instead, responsive to local community conditions and concerns. However, these models and practices often faltered or faded away due to the perception of globally dominant socialization values and practices as “necessity.”
My findings urge South Korean early childhood education to pay attention to practices, ideas, and sentiments of local actors (with emphasis on children as crucial local actors). They should consider taken-for-granted local values and habitus as valuable, legitimate sources for creating what is widely understood as good, quality educational practices. I believe this shift in the educational environment would allow teachers to disclose reservations about imported curriculum, openly discuss implicit expectations, and thereby develop feasible, durable, indigenized models and practices that fit local contexts. In turn, teachers like Ms. Choo would not be frustrated by their inability to achieve ostensibly attainable goals, nor would they be pessimistic about teaching. Instead, they could be content to remain in the profession while retaining their initial enthusiasm, sincerity, and goodwill.
Hyemin Lee: Ideologies and practices about cultivating and fostering a specific type of self stand at the core of the South Korean socialization landscape. As you emphasized, these ideologies of self are a historical and political product born from importing specific strands of Western pedagogies and translating them as “advanced and scientific” (32). At the same time, your chapters and examples demonstrate that everyday practices implicitly entail the so-called old and traditional/Korean socialization values and ideas about self. Perhaps with a brief introduction of your research trajectories, could you tell us how the concept of self, especially the ideologies of self, became central to your research and book?
Junehui Ahn: The ideology of self became a central theme of my book through its significance within local contexts as well as within my intellectual trajectory as an anthropologist of children and childhood. In previous research, I studied class-specific features of American selfhood at a Midwestern preschool. Therefore, anthropological studies of self or personhood were in my intellectual toolbox when I entered Somang preschool. Simultaneously, discourses on children’s self-concepts were at the center of demands to reform early childhood socialization practices and ideologies within South Korea. Economic restructuring and globalization during the last few decades demanded global citizens with a broad array of skills; and these new skills, values, and qualities are often discussed under the term/concept of self. Teachers in Somang preschool explicitly stated “raising a child who has a self” as a major socialization goal. In this respect, the concept of self as a central theme of my book partly emerged from its significance in local contexts.
As my previous work was conducted in a U.S. preschool setting, my book inherently has a cross-cultural component. Thus, when I first began fieldwork for this book, I assumed the term “self” in Somang preschool had identical meaning to the one I encountered in the U.S. Midwestern preschool. The ostensibly similar socialization goals, practices, and even physical environments of both preschools assured my presumption. However, as I discovered, the two had highly different constructs. The self practiced and sought after in Somang, at first, looked much like so-called Western or globalized self because it typically entailed values of creativity, diversity, and self-confidence. However, by the time I left Somang, I saw it as distinctively Korean. My book is a journey to find local meanings of selfhood as (re)constructed by children and teachers and interpret the contradictions, heterogeneities, and dilemmas involved in these processes, using anthropological discussions of self and personhood as analytical tools.
Hyemin Lee: Your book looks at the South Korean socialization landscape, which constantly interacts with globally circulated socialization ideologies and practices. Because globalization has continued to play a significant role in the South Korean socialization landscape, I assume some new socialization landscapes/scenes have emerged. Have you noticed any changes in educational policies, approaches, curricula, and everyday practices in preschools (including Somang) that assert new or different ideologies of self?
Junehui Ahn: There have been significant changes in the South Korean socialization landscape since my Somang experience. Back then, the explicit pursuit of global personhood and adoption of Western curriculum (especially child-centered and play-oriented programs) to achieve this end were new to South Korean early childhood education and were features of middle- and upper-middle-class preschools. Somang, located in an affluent Seoul neighborhood, actively embraced new global socialization ideals and introduced what they understood as fancy, Western, global curriculum to parents who were eager to raise a creative, competitive, successful child. Now, ten years later, adoption of play-oriented and child-centered curriculum is no longer special nor class-specific. South Korean parents across classes are familiar with imported curriculums and send their children to preschools implementing these new pedagogies. This shift also resonates with changes to educational policies. In 2019, the Korean Ministry of Education announced national early childhood education curriculum reform that declared “child- and play-centered pedagogy” as its main agenda. Now, all preschools in South Korea are expected to employ this national-level agenda in their pedagogy. Interestingly, upper-middle-class parents are now less interested in sending their kids to child- and play-oriented preschools. Rather, they opt for private English academies called English kindergarten, so their children experience English immersion education as early on. They also send kids to private after school institutes for math, reading, and writing, and so on, where teacher-centered dyadic learning prevails. While these academies are costly, parents willingly pay in order to give their kids a competitive edge.
Hyemin Lee: One of the many strengths of the book comes from your efforts to “bring voices of the children to the current thinking of socialization and globalization” (19), particularly by showing how children’s agentive participation further shapes teachers’ interpretations and conceptualizations of these global imports. In this respect, I am very interested in hearing more about your research methodologies, positionality, and everyday interactions with children, which led to your findings in Chapter 5. Specifically, I want to know more about your “microhistories” approach. Could you elaborate more on this approach, its significance, and how it led to your findings in Chapter 5?
Junehui Ahn: My research aimed to bring children’s voices and agencies to the globalizing socialization scene. So, it was essential to gain access to the children’s social world and capture their experiences and perspectives. However, being an adult posed obstacles to this research objective. Children usually see adults in preschool settings as authoritative figures who control their behaviors; therefore, children modify their behaviors and speech when adults approach them. To position myself as an atypical adult, I employed several strategies, including Corsaro’s (1997) “reactive method of field entry.” That is, I entered play areas, sat down, and waited for kids to react to me—the opposite of what most teachers do. Gradually, children began asking me questions and drawing me into their activities, and they eventually defined me as an atypical adult. I also tried to dissociate myself from authority and power typically attributed to adults in classrooms by not participating in activities that signify adult authority or skills, such as initiating play, settling disputes, or directing activity. This allowed me to interact with children in a more egalitarian manner, permitting observation and collection of children’s peer interactions without affecting their nature or flow.
Microhistory approach was not what I planned from the start, but it emerged during the research process and got its name at the writing stage. As I spent the whole school year in Somang preschool, I could see the ebb and flow of classroom activities and curriculum. Thus, I could observe how particular classroom activity changed through mutual involvement and the interplay of children and teachers. With detailed microhistories of each activity in hand, I could link each case to the larger theme of multidirectionality of learning, which conceptualizes socialization as a process of testing, negotiation, reinvention, and reproduction, wherein both children and adults mutually attune, collaborate, and shape learning experiences. The microhistory approach worked well since I was fortunate to conduct fieldwork shortly after the preschool adopted imported curriculum. As teachers experimented with various aspects of the Reggio curriculum during a formative period, I could observe pedagogical shifts.
Hyemin Lee: Finally, socialization landscapes and experiences are themes that many readers can relate to, as they have had their own socialization experiences during early childhood (such as preschool), with a possibility of being exposed to different socialization discourses and ideologies that circulate globally. If there is one thing that you would want readers to learn from the case of the South Korean socialization landscape, what would that be?
Junehui Ahn: As any author would, I have many thoughts and findings I hope to convey to readers. But, to choose one, I would say reflection. The conflicts, ruptures, and tensions I describe in this book illustrate that what we regard as good, quality education is never ideologically free. I hope this South Korean story provides opportunities for readers to reflect on their own upbringings or socialization practices and view them not as something natural but as always wrapped in the social fabric of power, ideologies, and inequalities.
I wish I could say the 99th page of my dissertation was somehow at least partially illuminating about what I tried to say with my doctoral research, but alas. The 99th page contains some of the analysis I conducted in my third chapter, but is only briefly indicative of the overall argument. The project is concerned with what I have observed as a burgeoning, resurgent form of religion-based homophobia in Singapore. This neo-homophobia is conjured through the Christian idea of metanoia, which encourages followers to aspire towards spiritual transformation. Think of it as a change of mind, but spiritual. The idea is to always be in service of the faith.
By looking at multimodal, narrative, and metapragmatic discourses, I consider how language works as a mode of correction for queer individuals. It conveys logics of change and transformation through varied discourses that prescribe the same goal: to turn away from queerness and towards the normative (whatever form that might take). Most of my data comes from these video testimonials produced by a non-denominational Christian organization in Singapore, which are not only multimodal in production, but also narratively structured in the way the stories are told. I also conducted interviews with queer individuals in Singapore who used to or still identify with a religion, which form the metapragmatic talk that I analyze for instances of truth-telling – a very Foucauldian approach to looking at my data.
Writing the dissertation has been sobering, not just in terms of my development as a scholar but also as someone who is gay but not Christian. The timelessness of queer animus is located in its reinvention, and linguistic anthropology has given me a way to make sense of it. I now am – and we should all be – more suspicious of any calls for change and transformation: what do we leave behind, and where are we headed?
Pak, Vincent. 2023. “Homecoming: Discursive Metanoia as Homophobia.” Ph.D Diss., Singapore and London: National University of Singapore and King’s College London.
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.
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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.
CaMP Anthropology 