CaMP Anthropology

Elina Choi and Joshua Babcock

Image by Wolf for Pixabay

AI anxieties are widespread today. But how new are these concerns?

Generative AI technologies have come on the scene relatively recently, via large language models (LLMs) and associated chatbots like ChatGPT or image generators like DALL-E and Sora. However, the fears and narratives surrounding these technologies have deeper roots. While fear narratives might appear to point unequivocally toward the properties or effects of a feared object, this is only part of the picture. As scholars of modernity and psychosis have long known, fear narratives point back toward the narrator as much as—if not more than—the object or focus of anxiety.

To critically engage with and reflect on this anxiety, our blog post begins by revisiting the central thesis of Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. While Hofstadter located the paranoid style firmly within the McCarthy-era American right, we show instead that, when it comes to outlets’ political leanings, the paranoid style is highly malleable regarding AI. Regardless of the outlet, in other words—whether Fox News or The New York Times—authors consistently narrate the impacts and functioning of AI in a profoundly paranoid way.

At a time when news sources are consistently categorized as “inherently different” poles of a partisan binary, we suggest instead that paranoia is a pervasive thread running through reflexively public, deeply-mediatized discussions of AI. We ultimately advocate for an interactional approach to both AI and AI’s corresponding paranoid narratives, weaving in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s meditations on paranoid versus restorative reading.

The Paranoid Style as American Cultural Genre

Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay begins by discussing three newspaper articles from 1951, 1895, and 1855. Drawn from a “Texas newspaper article of 1855,” the final excerpt sounds the alarm about a supposed plot by the Catholic Church to “[bring about] our [i.e., America’s] destruction and…the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions” (78). Read alongside quotes from Senator McCarthy and the Populist Party Manifesto, the supposed Pope-led conspiracy seems less like a laughable, distant relic of outdated U.S. Protestant fears. Instead, the texts together reveal the continuities of paranoia as a “strategically-deployable shifter” (Urciuoli 2003) in American politics, a transposable “frame of mind” always in search of “a different villain” whether that be Catholics, Masons, or generative AI.

We revisit the “Paranoid Style” to track its continued resonances in the present, but it is important to distinguish the terms “style,” “stance,” or “reading” from identities imagined as fixed, individual essences or sorting hat-style labels, as linguistic anthropologists and critical sociolinguists like Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall have argued. We here find it instructive to turn to Eve Kanofsky Sedgwick. In her provocative introduction, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” Sedgwick points out that “the paranoid” is not a pointed label for a specific political or personal demographic, “and certainly not [a] stable personality [type],” but a “changing and heterogeneous relational [stance]” that is fluid and open to change (128). Sedgwick further argues that due to the normalization of paranoid thinking “at every point in the political spectrum” (143), to hold “anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant” (126). Far from an exclusively right-wing or historically particular framework, in other words, paranoia has become broadly and deeply entrenched across seemingly “normal” (Hofstadter 1964, 77) political positions.

Media Reportage as Analytic Object

In this blog, we don’t attempt to argue about or explain the technical workings of AI. Instead, we explore the paranoid social stances surrounding AI.

To do this, we input a selection of articles from both Fox News and The New York Times into ChatGPT and asked: what is the author of this article afraid of? This move has, of course, become a well-worn, often unmotivated trope in commentary on generative AI. However, we employ this technique neither to treat the chatbot as an unproblematic analytic tool nor to assert that it is designed using questionable underlying assumptions about fear, subjectivity, and interiority—facts a critical observer is prepared to accept even without the analysis. Rather, we started here to open up the possibility of something genuinely new, unexpected, or surprising—for Sedgwick, a defining characteristic of reparative reading—in the encounter among us (the researchers), the written texts, and the AI language model.

And something new did, in fact, emerge for us. After querying the articles individually, we pasted each of the AI-generated paragraphs back into Chat GPT and asked for some repeated keywords. ChatGPT responded with: artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition, political orientation, societal implications, discrimination, privacy, democracy, control, surveillance, regulation, existential threat, unpredictability, and human intelligence. When asked for the most highly repeated adjectives, ChatGPT identified: deep, truly, really, genuinely, potentially, uncontrolled, existential, responsible, profound, widespread, unforeseen, dangerous, and significant.

When asked “What are the author’s emotions behind the articles I pasted today?” ChatGPT responded:

The emotions behind the articles you provided today range from genuine concern and fear to apprehension and worry. The authors express a deep sense of unease about the potential consequences of various technological advancements, particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence. They convey feelings of dread regarding the erosion of privacy, threats to democracy, societal upheaval, and the loss of human relevance in the face of advancing technology. Overall, there’s a palpable sense of alarm and urgency in addressing the risks associated with these developments.

The term we emphasized above—erosion—was not one that had immediately stood out to us. Seeing it here, we knew we had to probe further.

Image by Pavel Danyuk for Pixabay

Narrating Moral Panic and Existential Threat

As we turned our critical attention both to ChatGPT’s responses and the articles themselves, themes of erosion, especially “erosion of democracy” and “erosion of authentic human connections,” were indeed salient. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued long ago in Metaphors We Live By, metaphors take on a life of their own by smuggling in additional layers beyond what’s featured, denotationally, on the surface. As a description of a natural process, “erosion” carries a sense of inevitability and irreversibility that terms like “disregarding” or “attacking” don’t.

Despite this supposed naturalness and inevitability, however, “erosion” is a cause for alarm in mediatized discourses because it is supposedly new. It almost goes without saying that AI is not exceptional in this regard, but is just one point in a repeated pattern of moral panic over the supposed “erosion” of society and democracy brought about by the latest new technology (Thurlow 2006), from video games to the internet to the invention of writing. Even not-so-new technologies like smartphones recur as objects of paranoid reflection on “erosion”: as the Family section of The New York Times warned in 2023, “Ignoring a partner in favor of your phone, or “phubbing,” can lead to feelings of distrust and ostracism. Here’s how to stop.”

Anxieties focused on the experience of being “existentially threatened” and getting “outsmarted” by a nebulous, machinic enemy further rehearse long-standing fears surrounding human relevance and agency. In line with Hofstadter’s argument that “what is at stake [in paranoid thinking] is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil” (82), the paranoid notions of “existential threat” and the potential to be “outsmarted” by AI take on a moral dimension. The human vs. technology trope is neither new nor unique to journalistic, mediatized discourses, of course. A 2021 children’s movie called The Mitchells vs. the Machines—where “A quirky, dysfunctional family’s road trip is upended when they find themselves in the middle of the robot apocalypse and suddenly become humanity’s unlikeliest last hope” (from IMDB)—brings life to the paranoid’s greatest fear: an “uncontrollable” AI monster disrupting our otherwise “controllable” and “controlled” human society.

Sometimes, the moral binary within the paranoid style of AI discourses places fears of human interference at the heart of the matter. In addition to discourses about AI’s highly calculated behaviors, there are also claims that bad individuals and foreign nation-states are the underlying sources of “threat,” and not, for instance, AI companies.

As we hope is clear, AI is not unique in kind from other new technologies, even if it is commonly described as wholly unprecedented in human history. New technologies, in other words, have always shocked the current environment and challenged the perceived boundaries of reality. PhotoShop altered the previous notion of photos as pristinely accurate snapshots of time (notwithstanding the manual/analog photo-manipulation techniques that have existed almost as long as photography), and the invention of the camera permanently changed the concepts of memory, truth-to-nature, and objectivity. We here return to Sedgwick, who argues that “Paranoia is anticipatory” (130), “blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131). This has the potential to block the goals of positive change (136). Importantly, however, the blockage is never total. Restorative reading is always still possible.

Conclusion

While Sedgwick had a lot to say about paranoid reading, she was admittedly sparse when it came to its alternative: reparative reading. Yet to expand on what we foreshadowed earlier, she does spell out the crucial features of reparative reading in this passage:

“[T]o read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises…there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.”

It is in this spirit that we suggest novelty, surprise, letting go of totalizing desires, and indeed, allowing ourselves to hope. In doing so, we aim to open this space of hope up for others, too, if only in a small way.

Of course, we don’t mean to suggest that there’s no harm being done with AI. Long before ChatGPT became an object of elite white anxiety—with fears surrounding AI as a harbinger of “human extinction” bearing a strong resemblance to fears about “white replacement” voiced by some groups on the right—Black women and women of color like Timnit Gebru, Rumman Chowdhury, Safiya Noble, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Joy Buolamwini were rigorously studying and calling attention to the violence being perpetrated against intersectionally marginalized groups through digital technologies. Workers in postcolonial Anglophone locations like Kenya are paid $2 per day to consume and tag violent, disturbing, and traumatizing content so users at the core of the Angloscene don’t have to. Visual artists and musicians discovered in 2023 that their works were used en masse to train generative AIs without their consent, prompting class-action lawsuits that remain unresolved. Google’s new AI Overviews feature kept telling people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizza to keep the cheese from sliding off.

While the paranoid style embodies a generalized proposition that “things are bad and getting worse’’—a proposition that Sedgwick points out is “immune to refutation”—it also fails to render any specific predictive value or direction for oppositional strategy (142). Of course, “paranoid people or movements can perceive true things” (142). Yet this is where reparative reading comes into play. By locating the effects of AI firmly within interactions that always involve human agents, we can better keep in view the role played by fear narratives that get projected onto new technologies by individuals and groups. We can also work toward genuine accountability for AI companies—and the actually-existing people who manage and profit from them—rather than continuing the paranoid acceptance that the nameless, faceless “Amoral Superman” (Hofstadter 1964, 85) of AI is real in exactly the ways that anxious discourses claim.

About the Authors

Elina Choi is a junior at Brown University studying English and Entrepreneurship. Interested in the intersections between business, written communication, and AI, she began researching the linguistic implications of AI through Brown University’s UTRA award and has since conducted culinary economics and IP law research for Liberation Cuisine. Elina is from Seoul, South Korea.

Joshua Babcock is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Brown University. His current book project explores how technology, language, and race co-naturalize one another across scales and shape the conditions of possibility for belonging to the image of Singapore. In his other work, he studies the Singapore Sling, U.S. school board politics (with Ilana Gershon), and a ghost town called Singapore, Michigan. Josh is also the Communications Director for the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547093/the-unnaming-of-kroeber-hall/

Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: The book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall states that its focus is not on whether Kroeber Hall should have been unnamed or not. Referring to Yurok chief Robert Spott’s words quoted in the book, “Every story should have a foundation,” what is the foundation for writing a book about Alfred Kroeber’s work and advocacy for Native Californian people and the request to unname a hall bearing his name? Specifically, what key themes or events does the book explore to build this foundation?

Andrew Garrett: The University of California’s unnaming of Kroeber Hall in January 2021 provides the book’s frame (and, of course, its title), but mainly it is about what Kroeber’s most important work was and how to assess his twenty-first-century legacy. He was exceptionally prolific (with over 500 publications), but I argue that it is not Kroeber’s theories of culture, culture areas, or culture change or other general theories in anthropology that are his main legacy today, but rather the records that he created (and sometimes but not always published) in collaboration with Indigenous people who wanted to document their languages and stories. In The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, my main goal was to make visible the language and text documentation done by Kroeber and those in his circle, especially including the many Native people whose work he supported.

When Kroeber’s Yurok friend and collaborator Robert Spott said that “every story should have a foundation,” he was referring to one genre of Yurok story: the chpeyuer’ or creation story (another translation is myth), which explains how and why the world is as it is, based on what happened in specific places during the era of creation. The landscape itself is explained by events from the creation time, as are the behaviors of animals, birds, and fish, the appearance of animals and plants, and the practices of humans. Yurok creation stories are anchored in the specific places on the land where the events they record happened. Without such an anchor or foundation, Spott said, a story is an ’er’gerp, literally a telling or tale.

I quoted Spott for two reasons. The first and more important was to emphasize the link between places and stories, between land and culture, for Yurok people and indeed throughout Indigenous California. The second reason was to show that much of what was said in public about Kroeber during the unnaming fracas of 2020-21, including much that was said by university leaders, was unanchored or unfounded. In my book, I returned to the various documents (correspondence, notes, photos) that Kroeber and his colleagues and students created in the first decades of the twentieth century, in order to understand better what their goals were and what they accomplished (and failed to accomplish).

Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: You describe Kroeber’s language documentation legacy on Native Californian languages in detail, emphasizing his personal engagement with Native American people and their mutual appreciation. How does Kroeber’s engagement with Native Californians deepen our understanding of his language documentation legacy and its potential impact on language revitalization efforts?

Andrew Garrett: I stress in the book’s concluding chapter that Kroeber himself did not appreciate how the language documentation that he helped create would be used. He held on to a humanistic (and, as such, perhaps old-fashioned) conviction that people broadly benefit from the intellectual, artistic, and literary heritage of all cultures; he seems for this reason to have been dedicated to recording stories and the languages that encode them. This humanistic perspective is of course extractive insofar as the beneficiaries of Indigenous cultural knowledge are outsiders. But what Kroeber did not realize was that after his death, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Indigenous people throughout California would use these records to relearn languages, retell stories, and reconnect with families and communities.

One important critique of Kroeber, Boas, and others who engaged in research in the same mode is that they were interested only in what they viewed as traditional expressions of culture: they ignored or in some cases even suppressed evidence of adaptation to Euro-American society, cultural hybridization, and the like. This critique is valid (and I add evidence of Kroeber’s own suppression of linguistic hybridization or compromise). But a focus on presumed authentic Native cultural expressions sometimes also now suits puristic ideologies in Indigenous cultural reclamation. In some contexts, that is, what activists seek to recover are precisely the words and stories around “traditional” ceremonies, songs, and the like. Thus Kroeber’s own bias sometimes inadvertently suits today’s needs.

But I also show in the book that Kroeber’s overall project included documentation created entirely by Indigenous people based on their own wishes. One example of several I discuss: Kroeber taught his friend and colleague Juan Dolores, an important Tohono O’odham intellectual, to write in his language and supported his work over many years to create the first extensive corpus of written literature in the O’odham language (amounting to thousands of manuscript pages), also including sound recordings. I also discuss the Northern Paiute language work of Gilbert Natches, similarly supported by Kroeber, as well as community-centered documentation programs he organized in several parts of California.

Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: In the book, it is suggested that Kroeber, whether consciously or not, acted as an intermediary. People shared stories in their languages with him, trusting that he would preserve them for future generations. To what extent was this role predetermined, and to what extent did it emerge through his interactions with these communities?

Andrew Garrett: I think this role was very much emergent; in some ways, it is still emerging six decades after his death. In my book, I cite an anecdote told in 2000 by one of Kroeber’s students that seems revealing about the whole Boasian project as it was implemented by “the first Boasian” (to use Ira Jacknis’s term for Kroeber). George Foster reports that when he was working with Yuki in the 1930s, elder Eben Tillotsen told him, “I want you to make sure you get this right because my children and grandchildren are going to know about this only if they read what you write.” Foster then added, “I thought he had a very far-reaching view of the role of the anthropologist.” I think this dynamic, where an Indigenous participant understood what was at stake in language documentation and what is now often called “salvage ethnography” and the anthropological outsider didn’t appreciate this, was probably typical. Kroeber, like Foster, would have had no sense that the greatest beneficiaries of his work would be Indigenous communities and families themselves.

Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Chapter 7 is entirely dedicated to Ishi’s experiences immediately before and after he arrived at the University of California’s anthropology museum. How does the provided evidence show Ishi’s choices and shed light on our understanding of his life story?

Andrew Garrett: Ishi’s choices were constrained by many factors; a common narrative is that he was like a “prisoner” or “indentured servant” living in the museum. In chapter 7, I was interested in trying to understand Ishi’s agency — difficult as this is made by the fact that all records of his experiences are from those around him. But these records are from numerous sources, from the anthropologists and linguists who worked with him professionally (whether as his colleagues in the museum or in other, more paternalistic or extractive roles) to the many friends in San Francisco with whom he regularly socialized in the city or on weekend outings, and certain commonalities emerge. One throughline, I argue, has to do with his interest in articulating cultural values through narratives and other pedagogical practices. It can be hard for us now to see this in retrospect, but Ishi’s “academic” work with university researchers was actually of a piece with his “social” work with youths and other friends who were drawn to him and whom he taught about the world.

Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Finally, why is describing the Kroeber era’s blind spots in the book relevant for a deeper understanding of the decision to unname Kroeber Hall?

Andrew Garrett: As I show in the book, some of the blind spots or unexamined presuppositions of “salvage anthropology” and linguistics (as they are now often called) contributed both to the need to unname Kroeber Hall and to the documentary resources that many Indigenous communities rely on every day. For example, the vanishment assumption that prevailed in U.S. public discourse in the first decades of the 20^th century — the idea that Indigenous communities, their cultures, and their languages were on the verge of extinction — motivated collaborations by Kroeber and his students with Native people throughout California (and beyond). These collaborations created archival resources that are now in constant use for cultural and linguistic renewal. But the same vanishment assumption also led to a sense of Indigenous invisibility in public spaces such as universities. As the most prominent early anthropologist working with California’s Indigenous people, Kroeber himself became a symbol of such perceptions and of their many negative consequences. The decision to unname Kroeber Hall was made to ameliorate that symbolic impact.

             My dissertation analyzed the work of self-described Thai “design activists” who designed a building’s form, programming, and materiality to curtail corruption, encourage social justice, and improve political representation for their polity. Page 99 describes an encounter that is key to understanding why, during a very liminal moment in Thai history, architectural representation became political representation. The scene takes place in a design workshop for Thailand’s third parliament building, and the largest parliament ever built. At this workshop, three of the principal architects were reviewing a prototype of a desk they designed for the Senate’s assembly hall. Having already attended dozens of design workshops, I was startled when the soft-spoken senior architect became incensed at the sight of a green electrical socket, which his drawings had specified as blue. Given the enormity of a complex that was 11 times larger than the US capitol building, and that included spectacular features like an 11-story gilded tower glorifying the monarchy, this reaction appeared disproportionate. But this marks that coveted ‘aha!’ moment in an ethnography when phenomena in the field illuminate epistemological lacuna. What I saw as an inconsequential detail, my interlocutor understood as the materialization of political corruption, a material flow of the sovereign agonism and corruption that had prevented Thailand from approximating democratic governance.

…The parliament’s sprawling layout and labyrinthine layers of internal, multistoried courtyards comprise over five kilometers of surfaces: three times longer than the combined facades of the Palace of Versailles. Never mind the proverbial tree, I felt as if the architects were failing to see the forest for a bent needle. Why did something so relatively small become such a big issue?

Having practiced architecture for almost a decade in Thailand already, I was neither immune nor deaf to the fetishization of the perfect architectural detail among architects, mythologized in stories of Tadao Ando punching a mason for dropping a cigarette butt in his concrete, or Mies van der Rohe spending weeks examining the grain of every travertine slab he installed in the Farnsworth house. But this controversy was different. The design’s flaw was not a material property, or the sign of class tensions between an elite architect and a mason. Bad design manifested bad politics. Detached as the prototype may be from any circuitry, the plug entangled its supplier, its supplanted supplier, politicians, STECON, the Secretary of the parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister into what designers recognized as infrastructural corruption. I failed to see, as they did, the plug’s “totality” (Lukacs 1972), the underlying network of interrelatedness condensed into a coin of miscolored plastic, that allowed the design activists and government brokers to draw the scalar connection of a plug to a polity.

The plug’s polemics is what Barthes would call a ‘punctum:’ the disorienting detail “that pricks me” (Barthes 1980, 25). To its observer, the punctum is the detail that derails orthodoxy and confounds formulaic thought. It is a tiny element that unravels any tidy presupposition of a whole. Or to adapt Mary Douglas’s conceptualization of dirt, it is the detail indexing matter out of place, the threat that catalyzes systemic reterritorialization (Douglas 2002). Thus, to answer my question, and to understand how one plug within a spectacular parliament complex can provoke opprobrium, and how violations of the design are signified as violations of the political system, will be the horizon of this chapter. The short answer is the most obvious: the controversy cannot be reduced to a plug as such, but to the plug as a representation. For their interlocutors, an erroneous hue of a socket or the token of frailty in a sovereign’s body are symptoms of disorder, indexes of systemic derailment…

The plug controversy from page 99, I argued, constituted a cosmopolitical conjuncture of Thervadan, capitalist, design, democratic, and royalist cosmologies. For the parliament architects, the design’s corruption indexed and entailed political corruption: the green plug was provided by an unsanctioned supplier with connections to a member of the military junta. The lamination of political and architectural representation that undergirds the plug’s offensiveness led me to formulate the primary theoretical intervention of the dissertation, which I call ‘design-ification.’ Design-ification refers to the discursive framework that enables design activists to capture political problems as matters of design, a reframing that locates political problems as solvable within the reformist, progressive telos of the design process. In design-ification, activists configure the transformation between the citing de-sign and the cited sign as an ameliorative process with positive entailments for the future interactions that the designed citation will (re)mediate. The plug controversy of pg. 99 underscores how design activists leveraged the play of design’s citationality to propose agentive forms, materials, and spaces capable of acting within the ambiguous political tensions of a transitional moment in Thai history.

What do folklore, folklife, folk music, folk medicine, folk belief, and folk horror have in common? Apparently, something, although just what is open to debate. It all hinges, of course, on that crucial four-letter word, folk.

My colleague Michael Dylan Foster coined the term folkloresque to refer to new forms of expression that invoke “folk” materials in some way, investing the media in which they appear with special meanings (Foster 2016). Our first edited volume on this topic, The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World,explored these understandings of folklore from the perspective of disciplinary folkloristics. Earlier approaches to this topic tended to be negatively coded—with folklore-like materials in popular contexts treated as inferior, to the point of being labeled “fakelore”—and excluded from full consideration as expressive culture by scholars concerned with policing the boundaries of their subject matter. By contrast, The Folkloresque celebrates the creativity of folkloresque media-makers, aiming to reincorporate these materials into the study of culture more broadly.

The concept of the folkloresque has proven useful to folklorists interested in popular media, but we wanted to expand the conversation to related disciplines. Our new collection Möbius Media: Popular Culture, Folklore, and the Folkloresquebroadens the discussion, demonstrating the relevance of concepts like tradition and authenticity in historical, anthropological, and literary contexts, in addition to folkloric.

Creativity, Authenticity, Value

Möbius Media is guided by the assumption that representations of folklore and “folk-ness” in contemporary media matter beyond the analytic concerns of scholars. When something is felt to be folk, we argue, it is valued differently from other things. The volume’s contributors demonstrate the wide range of such values deployed by folkloresque products and performances. Thus Susan Lepselter writes of the aesthetic of “hominess” achieved by a YouTube cooking channel and how the channel engages with regionally-specific ideas of cultural authenticity, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes subverting them. She explores the way notions of regional cultural purity and authenticity are jettisoned in favor of a different kind of “realness,” one that combines the intensely local and the undeniably global (83-84).

In contrast to the intimate, unpolished “hominess” Lepselter describes, Anthony Buccitelli considers the antimodernist ethos expressed through highly-produced “cottagecore” and related media on online platforms like Reddit and TikTok. Such references to idealized rural (and also fantastical) life serve a potentially important critical purpose: “Against a backdrop of troubled modernity, anti-modern constructions of an imagined past—in this case a largely domestic but also potentially magical one—offer an opportunity to celebrate the comfort of routine while still finding a way out” (105).

Claire Cuccio discusses the transformation of an object of practical household use—the Nepali theki, a butter churn and storage vessel—and its reconstitution as a symbol of cultural and personal authenticity. Receiving a miniaturized souvenir theki prompted Cuccio to explore both its prior history and its new role as an emblem of the ambivalent relations of past and present. “As with other cultural objects that have become obsolete,” she writes, “the theki today signifies an increasing array of meanings that embrace the past while speaking to new experiences in the present” (128).

The folkloresque is also often deployed in world-building. Timothy Gitzen and Ilana Gershon discuss this in the context of a popular television series and video game, both of which are set in “our” universe and make reference to real-world folklore while simultaneously weaving their own bodies of diegetic folklore. The presence of this diegetic folklore drives the action of the narrative and provides compelling commentary on the value of esoteric knowledge. By contrast, Debra Occhi focuses on a locally-produced Japanese television/film series featuring figures from Japanese myth and legend depicted as tokusatsu superheroes and supervillains. Here, the contemporary media form uses familiar folkloric characters and themes to tell new stories, which in turn serve promotional purposes for the region where the show is produced.

Paul Cowdell, Craig Thomson, and Paul Manning, in separate chapters, each deal with the role of the folkloresque in the construction of horrific narratives. Cowdell locates certain episodes of the long-running BBC science fiction program Doctor Who (Newman, Webber, and Wilson 1963-present)within the folk horror subgenre, itself a highly folkloresque construct. Craig Thomson argues that vernacular perceptions of werewolves in the contemporary world have been influenced by folkloresque depictions of the creature in popular media. And Paul Manning outlines the ontological and epistemological strategies of the “weird” fiction of Ambrose Bierce, noting that appeals to folklore-like framing and structure imbue such stories with a sense of closeness and potentiality.

Romance, Longing, and Belief

That the folkloresque registers a specific complex of cultural values—tradition, authenticity, heritage, and so on—suggests a positive coding in performance and use. Folkloresque materials are valued specifically because of their ability to embody and express these concepts, and focusing on this positive dimension is one way the folkloresque sidesteps the problems with earlier scholarly ideas like fakelore. Conversely, folkloresque media also has the potential to shore up and celebrate hyperconservative ideals, and several of the chapters in Möbius Media take a highly critical stance toward such uses of traditionality.

One common issue in folkloresque media is the phenomenon I call the “folkloresque regress,” discussed in the volume’s introduction (7-9). This is when popular invocations of folklore cast “folkness” into a flattened, monolithic, collective, and often idealized cultural past. The folkloresque regress is of course closely related to the primitivist discourses that Marianna Torgovnick (1990) identified. The main difference is that the “folk” comprise the culturally and geographically proximate equivalent of the primitive, albeit somewhat higher on the cultural evolutionary ladder that still informs much popular thinking on the subject (Dundes 1980, 2). While this regressive tendency may have positive implications for the creators and audiences of folkloresque products (as in the cottagecore media Buccitelli describes), it can also crystallize problematic assumptions about both past and present people(s). The antimodernism that Buccitelli so effectively highlights can serve, as he suggests, as an effective coping mechanism for people suffering from modernity’s perceived depredations; but it may also lead to ahistorical claims, negative stereotypes, and marginalization.

For example, the regressive practices of the African safari industry are the focus of Lisa Gilman’s chapter. She notes how tourist facilities sell a highly constructed, and deeply artificial, model of “African” culture. The folkloresque functions in this context to mask its own artificiality: crafts, foods, and experiences all create a sense of “real” African experience, even as they fail to connect with or represent the actual lives of local people. Instead, they deploy an illusionary, exoticized version of what she calls “an imagined pure, precolonial, primitive ‘Africa’/‘African.’”

Kimberly J. Lau’s chapter discusses an immensely popular series of vampire films and novels. Lau argues that the Twilight series encodes a particular model of white male identity and expresses a longed-for return to white patriarchal values. The “monstrous longings” that Lau reads in these stories articulate in devastatingly critical ways with the rise of Trumpism in the US.

Another dimension of the folkloresque is its power to shape belief and discourse in the present. Catherine Tosenberger’s chapter, for example, discusses how Modern Traditional Witchcraft “engages with the folkloresque on several levels: not only by directly invoking folklore to lend authenticity to its practices and through replication of traditionalist folkloristics but also through the use of recent non-folklore scholarship that itself engages in folkloresque argumentation” (265). David S. Anderson, meanwhile, tackles the problem of Atlantis, the legendary lost continent, and specifically the pseudo-archaeological claims used to propagate belief in it. Originally a literary flourish of Plato’s, “a folkloresque creation serving as a parable to remind the rulers of Athens that they must not succumb to hubris” (277), Atlantis nevertheless emerged as a site of real longing and spiritual questing for thinkers who saw it as, among other things, a way of accounting for similarities in ancient cultures.

The Power of the Familiar

To a large extent, the folkloresque is about invocations of the familiar. As we argue in both The Folkloresque and Möbius Media, following S. Elizabeth Bird (2006, 346), folkloresque media depend for their success on the ability of their audiences (in the broadest sense) to recognize their cultural referents, whether real or imagined. Without such recognition, the appeals to tradition, authenticity, and identity embedded and embodied in folkloresque products and performances would fail to resonate.

The power of familiarity is visible in the explicit repetition in both folkloric and folkloresque performances. Ron James illustrates the power of repetition in his discussion of Mark Twain’s clever use of an oft-retold legend about journalist Horace Greeley. In a speaking engagement, Twain exploited the “tiresome repetition” of the story (309), telling the now-banal narrative again and again until his audience erupted in laughter. And Foster, in his concluding chapter, notes the importance of mimesis in both folkloric performance and folkloristic scholarship. Foster discusses images of a traditional Japanese monster called Amabie that circulated online as memes during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the daily Instagram posts of Japanese diplomat Hisao Inagaki during the same period. The title of his chapter, “Nothing is Original,” is not, perhaps, as provocative as it may seem (or perhaps it is): Foster’s argument is that “the copy itself is a critical (if not the most critical) mode of creativity” (331).

Unpacking this sense of the familiar, exploring the power of repetition and the recognizability on which it depends, is the goal of scholarship on the folkloresque. Familiarity and recognizability de-center problematic ideas like authenticity (on which, see Bendix 1997) while recognizing their importance to the people whose cultures, whether mediated or commoditized or not, are under discussion. While the specific meanings attaching to “folk” media necessarily vary from product to product and person to person, the folk qualifier is nevertheless a hint that what is being invoked operates on a familiar cultural level.

Despite the longstanding and oft-lamented marginality of folklore studies, the material of folklore continues to be of great interest to non-specialists (Tolbert 2015). We hope that this new exploration of the folkloresque will invite interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. And we hope that the chapters and ideas in Möbius Media will be of relevance to scholars working in any field who seek to understand cultural production and consumption.

References

Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bird, S. Elizabeth. 2006. “Cultural Studies as Confluence: The Convergence of Folklore and Media Studies.” In Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction, 344–55. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Dundes, Alan. 1980. “Who Are the Folk?” In Interpreting Folklore, 1–19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Foster, Michael Dylan. 2016. “Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque.” In The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, 3–33. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.

Foster, Michael Dylan, and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, eds. 2016. The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Newman, Sydney, C.E. Webber, and Donald B. Wilson, dirs. 1963. “Doctor Who.” BBC.

Tolbert, Jeffrey A. 2015. “On Folklore’s Appeal: A Personal Essay.” New Directions in Folklore 13 (1/2): 93–113.

Tolbert, Jeffrey A, and Michael Dylan Foster, eds. 2024. Möbius Media: Popular Culture, Folklore, and the Folkloresque. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Torgovnick, Marianna. 1990. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Carrie Lane: If you were addressing an audience of new college grads about to begin their post-college careers, how would you describe your book and its argument?

Claudia Strauss: It’s funny how our research can resonate in ways we don’t expect.  I didn’t set out to write a book offering career advice when I studied contemporary work meanings in the US, but I’ve found that audiences are curious about the personal implications of my findings.  (I will use work as shorthand for waged work in a market economy, although we know it has other meanings cross-culturally and historically.)  My research is based on discussions with racially and ethnically diverse job seekers in a wide variety of occupations, from warehouse workers to corporate managers, in the early 2010s, when it was very difficult to find jobs.  Thus, I also learned about what being out of work meant for my participants.  Some were at the beginning of their careers; others reflected on several decades of working.

College graduates are often told, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  It is wonderful if you can make a living from your passions, but that advice can backfire if you don’t have a passion or if you can’t make a living from it.  (See also Gershon, 2017.)  What I learned from my interviewees is that you can still have a satisfying life if you have a good-enough occupation.   

A good-enough occupation was not what my interviewees had thought they would be doing when they graduated (whether from high school, community college, undergraduate, or graduate studies); instead, they fell into it.  For example, one woman eventually became a successful grant writer long after obtaining a master’s degree in English.  First, she sold textbooks, then she worked for a philanthropic organization, then she parlayed her writing skills and part-time student jobs at her colleges into a grant writing position at a local university.  A good-enough occupation does not have to live up to your highest ideals so long as you enjoy it and feel useful in some way.  Those who felt they were doing harm in their job were miserable, as David Graeber also found in Bullshit Jobs (2018).  Unlike Graeber, however, I spoke with people in a wide range of occupations who enjoyed their work.  Interestingly, there is strong cultural support in the US for other ways of choosing an occupation (find your passion, move up in a career, or take any job that pays well enough), but there is no comparable discourse advocating for a good-enough occupation. (See also Stolzoff, 2023.)

I also found, surprisingly, that almost a third of my participants unironically described at least one of their past jobs as fun!  It is surprising given our semiotic association of fun with leisure activities.  What made a job fun were small work pleasures: the social environment, the physical environment, and tasks they liked.  New graduates or those rethinking their career paths will appreciate Chapter Six, where I explain the four different approaches to choosing an occupation I found among my participants, as well as some of the overlooked aspects of a job that could make it enjoyable or drudgery.

Carrie Lane: What might a semiotic anthropologist find especially useful in your book?

Claudia Strauss: In What Work Means, I consider the meanings of key symbols.  Why fun, of all words, to talk about jobs?  Who used that word, who didn’t, and why?  Why is a white picket fence conventional shorthand for a good life in the US?   (I argue it resolves conflicting American discourses about consumption.)  

When I analyzed the comments of my participants, I considered not only what they said, but also how the speaker framed their comments to express the cultural standing of their views.  By cultural standing, I mean what they believe to be their view’s acceptance in their opinion communities as well as how they imagine I would judge it (Strauss, 2004).  For example, I was intrigued by a supply chain manager’s response when I asked if work was central to his identity.  First, he said yes, but then he quickly clarified his response: “Yes um…by saying—although I work to live, I don’t live to work.”   It was as if he worried that I would think less of him if he lived to work.  Several others expressed their rejection of workaholism in the same way, as if that were the shared view in their opinion community.   Through cultural standing analysis, we can see not only which views were frequently stated but also, and more importantly, which views they thought were widely shared in their social circles—or were so taken for granted that they did not need to be stated at all.

Carrie Lane: In What Work Means, you delineate four different, if overlapping, ways Americans think about the place of work in a good life. What are those four ways, and why is it important that we understand the distinctions and connections between them?

Claudia Strauss: One of my key findings is that only a minority of my participants live to work, meaning that their work is central to their identity and interests, and they willingly devote long hours to it.  What was far more common than a living-to-work ethic among my interviewees was a diligent-9-to-5 work ethic.  Those with the latter value believed they had a moral duty to be productive workers, but they also wanted boundaries for their worktime because it was only one part of a good life for them.  They believed it is neither healthy nor morally right to make work your highest priority. 

We academics may see the living-to-work ethic in ourselves or among our colleagues and other professionals and thus overlook the way most Americans relate to their jobs.  Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has had a lasting influence on descriptions of American culture, especially among critics of what he and they consider the irrational goal of living to work.  I share their admiration of Weber’s brilliant description, but he privileges the ideal type of business owners, who profit from long workdays, over the outlooks of ordinary workers.  The United States is the only wealthy country in the world without federally mandated vacation pay or holiday pay, perhaps due to the misconception that true Americans live to work.

A living-to-work ethic and a diligent-9-to-5 work ethic are two versions of what Weber called a Protestant work ethic or, as I prefer, a productivist work ethic.  The two productivist work ethics focus on the moral value of waged work.  Of course, people work primarily to earn an income.  In What Work Means I also discuss what my participants mean by working to live (What are life necessities?  If you cannot afford necessities, where can you turn for help and retain self-respect?) and working to live well (What kinds of consumption did they desire?  What ambivalences did they reveal about their consumption desires?)

Carrie Lane: One important point you make in the book is that when we talk about work, we often fail to distinguish between different types of jobs, as work is always experienced within specific contexts, never as an abstraction. What do you see as the dangers of this tendency toward abstraction?

Claudia Strauss: There is too much social commentary about people’s “work ethic,” which is imagined as a willingness to take any job regardless of the assigned tasks or pay level. This bolsters the tendency of conservative politicians and policymakers to blame poverty on low-income people’s work ethic instead of paying attention to the pay and working conditions in the kinds of jobs available to them.  The new catchphrase in the US is “Nobody wants to work anymore.”  The truth is that the US is experiencing a labor shortage, not a work motivation deficit.  Over the last fifteen years, we’ve gone from six jobseekers for every opening to less than one due to declining birth rates, Baby Boomer retirements, and immigration restrictions.  “No one wants to work anymore” really means that when workers have a choice, they will quit jobs with lousy pay and working conditions and look for a better opportunity. 

I realized my own tendency toward abstraction late in my research.  For example, one question I asked was whether work was central to their identity, when I should have asked if their job was central to their identity.  As Marx explained, seeing labor as an abstraction is a product of a capitalist economy.

Carrie Lane: In your concluding chapter, you outline two competing visions of the future of work: one in which all adults are able to (and indeed must) support themselves through waged work, or one in which people are liberated from the requirement to work (or work so much) in order to survive. How do you position your own findings with regard to these imagined narratives?

Claudia Strauss: There is an interesting divide on the Left between laborist and post-work politics.  

I take the term laborist from Kathi Weeks (The Problem with Work, 2011).  As Weeks explains, laborists “celebrate the worth and dignity of waged work and . . . contend that such work is entitled to respect and adequate recompense.”  Because laborists stress the centrality of paid work for a meaningful life, they worry that if advances in AI and robotics create mass unemployment, the result will be not only widespread poverty but also lives bereft of purpose.

Post-work advocates like Weeks disagree that waged work is necessary for well-being.  Drawing on the theories and politics of autonomist Marxists like Antonio Negri, who sought to expand the revolutionary class beyond workers, they call for shorter workweeks and more generous government support.  For example, Weeks questions why so many feminists have fought for women to have equal opportunities for waged work instead of demanding more free time.  From a post-work perspective, advances in automation that reduce the need for human labor could usher in a utopia of expanded leisure, if there are adequate social welfare programs to provide a decent life for all. 

My findings overlap with both visions but do not line up exactly with either of them.  Like the laborists, my participants did see working as one part of a good life and certainly wanted adequate compensation for it.  However, in agreement with post-work perspectives, most of them did not center their identities or interests on their jobs and would welcome shorter workweeks.  What both perspectives miss is that under the right conditions, jobs can bring pleasure.  I would like labor organizing to advocate not only for better pay but also for improving jobs to make them more enjoyable, and planning for the future to compensate for the loss of social relationships at work as more jobs are remote and short-term.

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501776465/throw-your-voice/#bookTabs=1

Alex Warburton: Your two main sites, a puppet theater and a children’s group home, aren’t obviously connected, yet you weave the worlds of the puppet theater and the children at Hope House together beautifully, not least through the book’s figurative backbone, a Chekhov tale performed by the puppet theater (“Kashtanka”). All three are imaginatively drawn into a shared narrative. Can you say more about your process designing the project and choosing your ethnographic sites, as well as putting them together—how initially were you thinking these sites together, and where did your research lead you?

Meghanne Barker: Ending up with two sites seemed random, during my fieldwork. I knew I wanted to work with children, and that access to a group home such as Hope House would be difficult to obtain, so I found the puppet theater as a kind of backup. But then, when both admitted me, I could not give up either. In hindsight, I can see that I came to the field with a curiosity regarding government-run, postsocialist institutions and a fascination with children’s fantasy worlds. In both sites, I found the surprising coupling of these two elements. 

They also balanced each other out, somehow. When I was planning a simple ethnography of children living in postsocialist institutions, people’s reactions tended towards, “That’s sad.” I sensed they felt sorry for me, and that they felt they could already imagine the orphanages I would find. When I started telling people I was researching puppet theaters, I received cheerful remarks such as, “That’s random!” And the truth is that childhood in Kazakhstan, as in many places, often contains hard realities mixed with playful activities that might get dismissed as trivial, but that I find wonderful.

Upon defending my dissertation, a committee member (whom I love) congratulated me on herding cats. I was encouraged to make the research into two books. At first, this two-for-one deal struck me as extremely convenient.

However, keeping the sites together for the book seemed like an opportunity to try to make something surprising and beautiful. Both sites created fantasies that had social significance. Instead of alternating between sites, as I did for the dissertation, I wanted to frame them in the book as components of a single story. “Kashtanka” struck me as a tale that resonated at both sites. For the puppet theater, it was the play where I saw the most lucid discussions of puppetry. By coincidence, Kashtanka’s story, of getting lost and eventually finding her way home, mapped onto the children’s own trajectory.

Alex Warburton: Your book focuses on what you call the familiarization techniques used by these institutions of childhood to generate affect-laden relationships. A primary technique is what you call the animation of intimacy. Why think about animation and intimacy together? 


Meghanne Barker: In common uses of puppetry as metaphor for social relations, there is an idea of total control, with one party completely passive to the whims of someone more powerful. I wanted to show how play and performance helped to hold together the institutions themselves, while also contributing to a larger ideology of childhood as the responsibility of the state. For this, I needed to move beyond an understanding of animation as some mechanical exertion of will over another body. Issues of affect were essential to the process.

I first got interested in questions of animation when reading literature on materiality. It was the doll that first got my attention in a course taught by Kriszti Fehérváry, when we read Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency. Then Alaina Lemon, my advisor, led me to work by Paul Manning and Teri Silvio on animation, and all of this blew my mind! They have been invaluable interlocutors as my work has progressed, along with other writers on animation such as Ilana Gershon, Molly Hales, and Shunsuke Nozawa.

When it comes to animation, two aspects that resonated with my sites were 1) a distributed participation framework (of a principal, animator, author, and so on housed in different bodies) that disturbs the neatness of a singular subject (which is useful for thinking both about the agency of objects and of children) and 2) the slippage between the animate and the inanimate. A distributed participant framework brought me to examine animation as an act of intimacy, while the slippage between the animate and the inanimate highlights the risks of bodies putting themselves in positions of dependence on others.

When I started my fieldwork, I planned to connect the two sites primarily by comparing the way children played with their toys to the ways adults brought puppets to life for the children. As I spent more time with both, I saw that the adults at Hope House also treated the children a bit like puppets or dolls, dressing them up and calling on them to perform for visitors. This initially struck me as an interruption to the children’s “free” play. However, the children sang and danced for one another during their “free” play. I came to see the teachers’ work with the children as an act of love, as a way of ensuring that care for them would continue when they left the temporary home.

Alex Warburton: Most anthropologists primarily work with adults. In addition to taking into account adults’ beliefs about children’s experiences, you also talk about the children’s lived experiences themselves. Why take the everyday world of children and their creative play seriously? How do you theorize the role of fantasy in producing and maintaining social relations, through what you call the creative chronotope?

Meghanne Barker: I think for many readers these two questions may not be obviously connected at first. However, if we change the questions and ask, “Why don’t many anthropologists take either children or their play as central objects of inquiry?”, one might argue that children are less interesting to anthropologists than adults because it is hard to disentangle what scholars understand to be psychological from cultural issues and because children are typically less consequential, politically, in many societies. And regarding the triviality of play and fantasy, these are by definition not real, so why should we study them? We put these together in children’s play and such a topic seems hardly as important as something serious like adults fighting over money and power, for example.

The notion of the creative chronotope as a space or activity that constantly moves between the fantastic and the real is one way of arguing for the consequentiality of fantasy. Because many children such as those at Hope House are constantly creating fantastic frames for themselves and others, we can treat them as experts in such endeavors. This helps me justify why children should be more important to anthropologists who do not have an immediate interest to them.

It is my hope that the theoretical frame outlined in the book will serve anthropologists of art and anthropologists of childhood. I would love to motivate anthropologists of non-children to read more ethnographic work on childhood. There is a rich tradition of anthropology of childhood, but these works are usually read and cited primarily by other anthropologists of childhood. Linguistic anthropology is perhaps an exception to this, in that the work on language socialization by key figures such as Bambi Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, along with ethnographic work done in educational settings, have become somewhat canonical.

Sometimes, activities we associate with children only become interesting to anthropologists once they find adults doing them. In the twentieth century, when performance studies and anthropologies of performance emerged, this was influenced by theorizations of play and its transformation into art and ritual in adulthood. In the twenty-first, as interest in animation and new media has emerged, anthropologists of animation (including work on video game culture and related industries) are mostly focusing on adult consumers and users of such cultures. Again, many of these scholars have been incredibly generous and supportive as my research has developed. But there is still much room for expanding empirical and theoretical work in anthropology regarding children’s participation in various gaming cultures, in the consumption and re-animation of various animated entertainments, and so on. Much of children’s pretend play in contexts where they are exposed to screen cultures is COSplay – there are children who literally put on Elsa dresses every day for years on end, and yet this is seen as unremarkable.

As anthropological interest in animation develops – and I hope for sustained or renewed interest in performance, but this is another topic – there is room for greater conversation between scholars of childhood and anthropologists not particularly interested in children to explore the full range of possibilities of animating, of creating diverse participant frameworks, and of voicing. I hope this book offers some tools for constructing that space.

In the case of this ethnography, I try to show that by following the play of children at Hope House, we can understand the world in which they live and the government-institution in which they are growing up. I also argue that their performances have political consequences, as they become public figures animating an ideology of Kazakhstan in which society holds up children as the nation’s future. That is, in the very act of their being animated by the adults who have them sing and dance for government and nongovernment sponsors, they are nonetheless participating in public and political life.

Alex Warburton: Your book has a number of ambivalences, wherein rupture and loss provides the possibility of new connections and reorganizations, from broken children’s toys to Kazakhstan’s history of forced deportation and displacement under Stalin. Can you say more about the productive use of ambiguities you found in your research? Does this have anything to do with your interest in literatures on developmental psychology (especially on attachment) and psychoanalysis?

Meghanne Barker: The slippage between animate and inanimate first drew me to attend to dolls and puppets, but I eventually found such ambiguity in children’s status. People handled the children at Hope House as if they were objects, dressing them up like dolls and puppets. While Ernst Jentsch’s original essay on the uncanny stresses the ambiguity of animate/inanimate, Freud’s essay seems productive in opening the repertoire of experiences that could produce this feeling and in highlighting the slippage between the familiar and strange. I found this intriguing, alongside theatre theorists’ interest in estrangement, for coming to see relationships not simply as unclear, but moreover as dynamic. I saw the puppet theater exploiting the movement between animate and inanimate. In examining global portrayals of institutionalized children, I found a more pervasive image of the creepy child, so badly socialized as to end up wild or dangerous.

I remain ambivalent about psychoanalysis and about attachment literatures. On the one hand, these are literatures that take seriously childhood and children’s social relationships as central to understanding society. At the same time, such literatures often posit a normative trajectory that imagines children growing up in an institution like Hope House as inevitably damaged. A second issue is their ethnocentric focus on the dyadic bond between mothers and children, a focus that I found insufficient for understanding children’s relationships with adults at Hope House and other institutions. I found that children made productive uses of ambiguity around adults’ statuses – in their play and in their understanding of social relations.

A friend, a while back, complained about the popularity of ambivalence. I think her problem with it was that people seemed proud to admit to having mixed feelings. I believe this friend felt it would be more interesting and useful if people just made up their minds whether they liked a thing or not.

If we look at literature on children and childhood, and based on my experience teaching childhood studies, I find that it’s hard for people to take a neutral stance when looking at children’s lives. When we read about children growing up in different historical and cultural contexts, my students want to know – or decide for themselves – which practices are good and which are bad. For me, the moments of studying children that are the most interesting are when they are hard to pin down, when they are “queer” or “sideways,” as Kathryn Bond Stockton writes, when they are weird and surprising and puzzling.

Alex Warburton: Videoed interactions play a large role not just in your data but in your analysis, in which you foreground the frame (your role as videographer, the presence of the camcorder, and your [re]watching of the videos). In lieu of stills, artful illustrations of scenes from Hope House and the puppet theater, as well as from the Kashtanka story, figure prominently in the book. I couldn’t help but think of how drawings lie at the heart of what we vernacularly call animation. Can you tell us about why you chose drawings versus other illustrative media, and why video turned out so methodologically important to you? 

Meghanne Barker: I wanted to make a film during my fieldwork, but I had no idea how, and everything turned out insufficient for this purpose. The videos turned out to be extremely useful for me, nonetheless, as they helped me attend to fleeting moments that would have gotten lost. Watching them a hundred times helped me understand what was happening. The camera’s constant presence added an additional framing device to worlds that were already full of frames of performance and of fantasy, so I felt this was important to theorize in the last chapter.

When writing the book, I wanted it to feel, at least sometimes, like a fairytale. A fairytale with too many footnotes. My brother Justin happens to be a brilliant illustrator. I wanted to offer illustrations that might remind a reader of a children’s book from the early twentieth century, a book for children who are old enough to read Peircian semiotics but young enough to appreciate the illustrations. I sent my brother stills from the videos to use as references, along with illustrations of various versions of “Kashtanka” that I liked. Yet he has his own style and genius, so while the illustrations based on the video stills are quite faithful, the illustrations of the Chekhov story are entirely his own. The dog Kashtanka bears some resemblance to Justin’s own dog, Toby.

Alex Warburton: What do you hope people take away from this book?

Meghanne Barker: I want readers to cry!

What I mean is, I understand that I need to make an argument and a contribution to literatures, but if my own familiarization techniques have worked at all, they will make readers care about the children (and the puppeteers, caregivers, and puppets). They will recognize the beauty and value in the children’s play and in adults’ endeavors to give them joy. They will recognize, by extension, the everyday aesthetic choices we make to hold one another’s attention, to keep one another close.