CaMP Anthropology

Communication, Media and Performance

Tag: India

Lisa Mitchell on her book, Hailing the State

April 21st, 2025

https://www.dukeupress.edu/hailing-the-state

Ilana Gershon: Why did you decide to call your book, Hailing the State? What becomes available for analysis when you understand protest as amplifying “efforts to communicate with the state” (p. 202) instead of resisting the state?

Lisa Mitchell: The term “hailing” comes from Louis Althusser, who famously wrote about the process through which individuals are interpellated as subjects of ideological state apparatuses. In his discussion, only representatives of the state (he uses a policeman on the street as an example) are seen as agents of the act of “hailing” and, by extension, the act of surveillance. Those on the street are significant only as the objects of the hailing, as passive recipients of the actions carried out by representatives of the state. But what I’ve encountered over and over again in southern India—actually all over India—are people who desperately want to be recognized by the state, want to be interpellated as subjects of the state, but whose efforts to be recognized and interpellated are repeatedly ignored or refused. They are active agents of a wide range of practices of hailing as they engage in surveillance of the state, seek to hold elected officials to their campaign promises and to existing legal provisions, and struggle to amplify their voices and be recognized and heard by various representatives of the state. In this sense, “hailing” does not mean bowing down before someone or something, but rather refers to collective efforts to get the attention of and be heard by someone in a position of authority when earlier individual efforts to be heard have failed.

The book’s argument draws from the experiences of two particular groups in India who have resorted to collective action in public spaces to amplify their voices, demand more equitable enforcement of existing legal structures, and hold elected officials accountable to their campaign promises. The first are Dalits, or those historically regarded as “untouchable” by orthodox Hinduism, who have organized collectively to insist on the enforcement of existing laws in the wake of violent atrocities perpetuated against Dalits. Scholars of the history of Dalit politics like K. Satyanarayana and Parthasarathi Muthukkaruppan have documented the repeated failures of state officials to ensure the prosecutation of upper-caste groups who have carried out brutal mass killings of Dalits, including in the wake of massacres at Kilvenmani in Tamil Nadu in 1968, Belchi in Bihar in 1977, and Karamchedu and Tsunduru in Andhra Pradesh in 1985 and 1991. These scholars have argued that the failures to fairly implement existing legal provisions have mobilized Dalit political organization. The second major source of evidence in the book comes from the movement for the creation of India’s newest state of Telangana, established in 2014 after a long campaign that dramatically intensified from 2009. Notably, three different political parties were voted into office on the basis of their promises to create the new (much smaller) state, but in each case, elected officials reneged on their promise once in office, fueling increasingly widespread collective actions that sought to hold these parties accountable to their campaign promises.

The book argues that people resort to collective assemblies in public spaces when other methods of (individual) communicative action have failed. I’ve been struck by how almost all existing theoretical analyses of collective political assembly frame collective practices only as resistance to or rejections of the state’s sovereignty, or as efforts to overthrow the state—whether Judith Butler’s assertion that bodies massed in public are an attempt “to contest and negate the existing forms of political legitimacy,” (Butler 2011) Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2005 description of collective strategies to gain recognition and inclusion as “techniques of challenging the sovereignty” of those in power, or Dario Azzellini and Marina Sitrin’s 2014 claim that slogans like “they don’t represent us!” are “a general rejection of the logic of representation.” This isn’t the way that many of my interlocutors in southern India talk about the political practices that they engage in. Instead, they demand that elected officials act to carry out the law equitably and fulfill their campaign promises because they expect officials to represent the voters who elected them.

William Mazzarella has pointed out that collective forms of political assembly tend to be seen as belonging to an “earlier sepia-tinted version of industrial modernity.” Scholars usually regard collective actions as playing a role in transitions to democracy (or as an external force on democracy) rather than as playing an integral or ongoing role within democracy. Instead of approaching the practice of hailing as uni-directional, then, one of the goals of the book is to take a relational approach to the analysis of the state and its representatives. The book recognizes that it is not just state representatives who hail subjects of the state, but that those on the street also engage in practices of hailing (and surveiling) representatives of the state, and that this is an important part of how democracy works in between elections. Far from seeking to escape the state (as scholars such as James Scott and David Graeber have argued happens in other contexts), many of my interlocuters in southern India actively desire to be recognized by state represetantives and incorporated into networks that connect them with the state in enduring ways, whether via government employment, through access to formal legal protections or state welfare programs, or by means of the recognition granted by state issued ID cards or formal land ownership documents.

In illustrating these desires to be interpellated by and more directly connected to the state, I trace the longer genealogies of collective representational practices like sit-ins, hunger strikes, mass outdoor meetings, road and rail blockades, strikes, the encircling of elected officials, processions, political pilgrimages, and human chains that preceded electoral politics. To fully understand the meanings of electoral politics we need to understand the existing sets of representational practices into which elections were introduced and the ways that these sets of practices shaped elections and were in turn reconfigured by them. Not all collective actions are efforts to hail the state—majoritarian collective actions, for example, often see their primary audience as minority groups within which they hope to instill fear rather than state representatives by whom they wish to be recognized. However, collective actions that do seek to gain the attention of the state are not simply demands for exceptions to the law, as Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between political society and civil society might suggest, but rather are very often seeking fair and equal application of existing laws or the implementation of the campaign promises made by elected officials.

Ilana Gershon: You not only argue that certain protests occur only because all other avenues for redress have failed, but also that when faced with these forms of protest, government and corporate officials are learning new ways to respond. Could you talk a little bit about what you think anthropologists should attend to when encountering similar dialectics of strategies in their fieldwork?

Lisa Mitchell: I’m glad you’ve asked your question that way. Part of my goal in writing this book has been to encourage anthropologists to open up our analytic vision and attend not just to what’s fashionable—focusing on governmentality and its expansion, for example—but also to pay attention to the many ways that states refuse to recognize or interpellate those within its vision. This means paying attention not just to those who participate in collective actions but also to the audiences toward which they are addressing themselves and, even more importantly, to the actions of those in power. I’ve written about the long history of associations between anger or other strong emotions and marginalized groups and have advocated for the need to attend not just to the emotions of the marginalized but also to the emotions of those in positions of authority who often seek to represent themselves as rational actors uninfluenced by emotion and who use the strong emotions of others as excuses to not recognize their communicative acts. What does the policeman feel? The university hostel warden or Vice Chancellor? The District Collector? The school board president?

There’s a long history of efforts to silence, derail, discredit, or criminalize forms of collective assembly in India, particularly under British colonialism, but also since independence in 1947 using colonial-era sedition laws that have never been removed. I argue that it’s important to pay close attention to these mechanisms of silencing, discrediting, or selective criminalizing. Gayatri Spivak famously asked whether the subaltern can speak. In this book I explicitly trace the ways that authorities try to prevent the subaltern from being heard, pointing to the limits of our existing theories of deliberative democracy. Rather than arguing that civility and soft, polite speech are preconditions for democracy, I demonstrate through a wide range of historical and contemporary examples that civility—the ability to speak softly and be heard—is instead an effect of political recognition, which ensures that loud speech or collective action becomes unnecessary. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to speak softly and know that they will still be heard.

Ilana Gershon: How has the introduction of different media changed the ways in which protest happens in India?

Lisa Mitchell: There are clear historical shifts in the ways that collective assemblies have been organized in relationship to available media. One of the important contributions of Hailing the State is to approach road and rail networks not simply as forms of transportation but more importantly, as communicative networks—in effect, as forms of media. So the book pays close attention to the ways that enabling and blocking the movement and smooth flows of large numbers of people function as communicative mechanisms to telegraph political messages across great distances, whether via processions or long-distance pilgrimages to a seat of power, road and rail blockades, or ticketless rail travel to political rallies. There’s a reason that rail blockades in India most often target the express train to the nation’s capital in Delhi. The railways are centrally administered, so railway lines are targeted when groups want to send a message to the central government. Bus systems, on the other hand, are state controlled, so they tend to be targeted for state-level issues. And as I discuss in Chapter 7, members of historically marginalized groups whose voices have a long history of not being heard begin to see themselves as having “arrived” politically when the government adds extra carriages or trains to accommodate their ticketless travel to political events.

The expansion of televisual and social media forms have also had profound impacts on the nature and locations of collective forms of assembly. One of the biggest shifts in the south Indian city of Hyderabad—India’s fourth largest and fourth wealthiest city where I’ve done most of my research—has been the establishment in the 1990s of a designated space for collective assembly. In Hyderabad, this is known as Dharna Chowk or demonstration square, but other cities in India have established similar designated spaces, including Jantar Mantar in Delhi, Azad Maidan in Mumbai, and Freedom Park in Bangalore. When first proposed in the 1990s, activists were strongly opposed to the establishment of Dharna Chowk, as it was located a couple of kilometers away from the State Secretariat on a quiet street off the beaten track. Yet with time and with the recognition that television and newspaper outlets offered regular coverage of events held there, people began to embrace the location, so much so that efforts to move it to the outskirts of the city in 2016 were met with strong opposition and residents of other cities like Tirupati have begun to demand their own designated assembly locations.

Even with the advent of social media—which some predicted might lead to the death of collective assemblies in public spaces—it’s become obvious that the massing of bodies in public spaces have remained important as the substance of many social media posts. And because of these shifts in the role of media, we now see political parties—more than ever before—trying hard to get out in front of popular movements to claim leadership, even where they have not previously played a role. Examples from India include gender demonstrations like the women’s wall in Kerala and farmers’ movements, in which political parties have tried to capitalize on momentum generated by others.

Ilana Gershon: In the past, we both have been inspired by a German media theorist, Friedrich Kittler, and I was wondering if you see traces of Kittler’s inspiration in this book as well?

Lisa Mitchell: That is such an important reminder! Although I don’t actually cite Kittler in Hailing the State as I did in my first book on the making of the concept of the mother tongue, I’ve been profoundly influenced by his call to pay close attention to the channels and networks through which societies are able to select, store, and process relevant information or data. As you know, while Foucault focused on the production of discourses, Kittler took this further to focus on the channels through which discourses were able to move and be received. Shifts in technology have enabled new forms of local and long distance communication, but they have also brought about reconfigurations of what counts as presumed proper language versus merely noise. In addition to the ways that railways and roads came to be available as new networks for long-distance communicative action which I mentioned in response to your earlier question, another central focus of the book is on the factors that have determined whose voices are able to be heard in the public sphere.

In this regard, my thinking has been deeply influenced by a longstanding advocate for the creation of Telangana state, Kaloji Narayana Rao (1914-2002), who I interviewed in the 1990s and who I discuss in Chapter 3. I remember him narrating the history of the Spoken Telugu Movement of the early 20^th century, a movement that has otherwise been almost exclusively historized as a liberal effort to expand literacy in Telugu by making the written form of language more closely resemble spoken language. At the time of independence, Telugu was the second most widely spoken language in India. And yet, as Kaloji pointed out, advocates of this movement chose a very particular dialect of spoken Telugu drawn from dominant caste groups in the wealthiest districts of the coastal region of Telugu-speaking South India as the spoken language upon which to base the new written language.

Kaloji went on to call the Spoken Telugu Movement the biggest atrocity that has ever been inflicted upon other caste gropus and residents of other regions of Telugu-speaking south India. He illustrated his point by describing a Telugu-language children’s radio program that had run continuously for the previous forty years. Every week the program aired three to five times, during which the voices of twenty to thirty different children would be heard on the air in each episode. And yet, he challenged, despite the fact that at least two to three million children had participated in the radio program overall, the only children whose voices were ever heard were those from the dominant communities of the two coastal districts of the state where what came to be recognized as “standard Telugu” was spoken. The voices of all of the other Telugu-speaking children in the state were, quite literally, not able to be heard on the radio. In Kittler’s terms, their voices did not even constitute data and could therefore not be conveyed through the existing communicative channels. Kaloji’s story also points to the dramatic limits of the deliberative models of democracy that dominate political theory today.

Ilana Gershon: How has writing this book shaped the ways in which you understand contemporary protest these days, especially the pro-Palestinean protests that are sweeping campuses right now? [swept campuses last year?]

Lisa Mitchell: There are clear parallels with other movements both here in the United States and elsewhere in the world in which voices have not been able to be heard or acknowledged, either individually or collectively. The biggest takeaway is that it’s important not just to devote attention to these communicative actions, but also to the other end of the communicative chain—what the late anthropologist Richard Burghart has called “the conditions of listening,” or the larger structures of power that determine whose voices are able to be heard. In other words, we need to attend to whose words register as data, and to the structures and channels that enable and empower refusals to hear. This returns us also to the point I made earlier that the option to speak softly is not available to everyone. Too often scholars focus exclusively on moments of collective, even violent uprising, without attending to the much longer histories of efforts to communicate that have been ignored, silenced, or even criminalized.

Attention to longer temporal histories and to the genealogies of communicative channels and circulation are crucial. This means also following the money, tracing the ownership and control of media channels and outlets, tracking the legal frameworks that regulate (or don’t regulate) these channels, and attending to efforts to subvert and regulate these forms of control. There are two recent historical moments I would point to in the United States as crucial to the reorganization of the discursive networks that shape our current media environment. The first was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which had required licensed media broadcasters to devote airtime to the discussion of controversial matters of public interest and to give airtime to contrasting views on these matters. And the second was the 2010 Citizens United supreme court case which overturned existing (bipartisan) restrictions on the political spending of corporations and profitable organizations and newly empowered such entities to engage in unlimited (and untracked) campaign financing and the funding of political media. This has unleashed corporate and dark money and media influences in ways that that amplify the voices of the wealthiest and most powerful. You can draw a direct line from these decision to today, when we have the world’s wealthiest man—one who bought and now controls major media outlets like the social media platform formerly known Twitter—systematically dismantling regulatory systems and abolishing existing structures of political checks and balances. It’s precisely these regulatory systems and structures of political checks and balances that can help prevent marginalized voices from being drowned out, ignored, and silenced.
John Mathias on his book, Uncommon Cause

December 30th, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zuckerman, Charles H. P., and John Mathias
2022     “The Limits of Bodies: Gatherings and the Problem of Collective Presence.” American Anthropologist 124: 345–357.
Jessica Chandras on her book, Mother Tongue Prestige

December 23rd, 2024

https://www.routledge.com/Mother-Tongue-Prestige-The-Sociolinguistics-of-Privilege-in-Urban-Middle-Class-Education-in-India/Chandras/p/book/9781032404554

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.
Moyukh Chatterjee on his book, Composing Violence

June 24th, 2024

https://www.dukeupress.edu/composing-violence

Drew Kerr: On one reading, you’ve offered a fresh take on the exclusionary Hindu nationalist project of perpetual crisis re/creating an internal enemy in India, which we might highlight a special animation to this crisis in 1992 with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, cemented as a model in the 2002 events of the Gujarat pogrom in your book, and now, as of January 22, 2024, in a way consecrated with the building of the Ram Mandir over the site of the destroyed Babri Masjid. You challenge us to not take these events — and major events like them across the globe — as finished and to not take them as simply destructive. Simultaneously, your work broadly challenges the idea and hope of witnessing in spaces of violence. I’m curious if you could explain the tensions you knead out between destruction and composure, and how violence forces us to rethink that relationship?

Moyukh Chatterjee: Thanks, Drew, for your question, which goes to the heart of the book and its ambition. The mise-en-scene of political violence, especially what is called communal violence and riots in South Asia, may be quite familiar to many readers and scholars – burned shops, cycles, cars, dead bodies, police marches. This violence is often categorized as religious violence and ethnic conflict, which is not very helpful at all since it assumes the violence can then be somehow sequestered within the boundaries of something called Hinduism and Islam which exists outside the secular apparatus of the courts, police, law, and elections.

But the dead bodies on the streets and the burned down shops and houses only show the destructive force of collective violence on lives and spaces. And as you mentioned, what do we do with an explicitly exclusionary project that also aims to create new forms of belonging and inclusion? What do we do when riots and pogroms are only act one, stage one, like the case of Gujarat 2002, when anti-Muslim pogroms became the launchpad for a new form of public, muscular Hinduism, a new form of majoritarian governance, and a new kind of wounded and triumphant Hindu self. In such contexts, I have suggested that composition rather than exposure may be more helpful. Since composition moves away from the framing of political violence as an event that is supposedly finished or as always ensconced within the framework of victim/perpetrator or even as something that is always already under erasure. In this way, my book builds on the work of a range of political anthropologists – Veena Das, Jonathan Spencer, Daniel Hoffman, Val Daniel, Pradeep Jeganathan – to name just a few who come to mind, who have explored this tension between the destructive and the productive in tracking the afterlives of political violence in different contexts.

In other words, composition is the answer to the problem of framing an object that does not end with the horror and brutality of subjection and humiliation, (and here I am thinking of the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten writing about racism) but continues to animate new spaces (courtroom and police station) and new forms of rule. (new laws or the use of old laws for new purposes). In a related but also different way, this helps us see the question of violence anew, not within the binary of violence/peace as if violence against minorities is an aberration or breakdown of democracy, but ask what kind of social and political relationships sublimate, organize, transform, and interrupt violence against minorities within liberal democracies.

Drew Kerr: A few different types of dialectics — for example, norm and ideology, erasure and exposure, witness and victim, majority and minority — come into being through violences that ultimately give flesh to the categories and roles of Hindu and Muslim. You clearly show us, though, none of these categories are ever fully self-evident or stable in concept for the researcher or in practice for the residents in 2002 and present-day Gujarat. I find this incredibly hopeful (thank you!) to think, write, and live beyond false and fixed dichotomies on one hand, as well as quite insidious, which, I think, plays a larger compositional role in the book and the events described. Can you tell us more about the logics of such an “impossible dialectic” (Agamben 2000) and how they showed up in, and comprised, your research?

Moyukh Chatterjee: Because I was working with paralegals and human rights activists, the dialectics you mention above, especially binaries like Hindu/Muslim, victim/perpetrator, acquittal/conviction framed my fieldwork (in almost overwhelming way) and it was a major challenge for me to not be fully absorbed or determined by them. Put another way, it seemed to me that the project of Hindu supremacy aimed to create an environment, an ethos, a background, where what you call false dichotomies appear self-evident, even experiential. So, I remember one Muslim witness telling me outside the courtroom that it was foolish to expect justice from the courts because they were Hindus. So beyond the breakdown of the law, the courts were doing something else, they were joining the wider political and social climate in Gujarat to declare to Muslims that they were outsiders, eternal outsiders.

Another example. During the pogrom in Gujarat, my interlocutors told me, it was a time when it did not matter what kind of Muslim you were – rich or poor, Shia or Sunni, apartment resident or slum dweller, judge or beggar – you were reduced to being a Muslim, and all the richness of other categories or all the differences of caste, language, sect, and region that mark the heterogeneity of Hindu/Muslim falls away. I think your question raises the larger context of social pluralism which is the norm (rather than the dichotomies) in India.

Speaking of binaries, the binary between impunity/rule of law and law/illegal also melts away when you observe the performance of trials and justice. So one day in Ahmedabad, almost a decade after the pogrom, you (Muslim witness) find yourself in front of the judge, and your neighbor is an accused, and you have to identify him as such, but the informal setting of the courtroom, or more specifically the lower courts in India, means that the accused can approach you, often in front of the NGO workers and paralegals, and ask you to forget the case, or reconcile, or otherwise intimidate you. Anthropology can reveal in such moments the human rights and statist fantasy of legal punishment, a fantasy often shared by activists, that one can move outside the social into a sanitized world of the legal.

Drew Kerr: Semiotics or signs don’t play an explicit role in the argument of the book; however, you do draw on the language of meaning-making, composing, and producing what is rendered as legible, licit, and legitimate (Das 1995) — what I might frame in one word as significant. On my read, I find the work your argument is doing to be very beneficial for also thinking through regimes of language, the entanglement of social forces and speech acts, and the interplay between political ideologies and human capacities of sign-use. I’d love to hear more about your choices, then, in composing the book’s theoretical arc, as well as composing yourself methodologically during your research.

Moyukh Chatterjee: An attention to semiotics, signs, and what you can call significance has been an integral part of my training in literature and anthropology. As a student of English literature in Delhi, I read Barthes and later in graduate school in Emory, I gravitated towards a group (or should I call them a cult?) of scholars and students who were very influenced by Deconstruction. But as an anthropologist, I felt uneasy dressing up my fieldwork in the language of deconstruction; it would mean that my fieldwork or stories would be to prove/disprove theoretical tendencies found within canonical texts by Foucault/Derrida or someone else. Nonetheless, I was deeply impressed with the readings that were offered in those classes – readings that deconstructed texts and performed incredible acts of interpretation!

So while composing the theoretical arc of the book, I thought maybe it will be a good idea to take some of the most familiar objects that frame political violence – witness, archive, trial, the unspeakable – and recast them, or attempt to recast them. To be frank, I am not sure I succeeded in doing all this in one book. And it was easier to show the limits of exposure than to compose violence. In terms of composition, I build on the literature on critique and post-critique. Composition builds on the limits of critique identified by literary scholars, for whom it is primarily a way of reading texts, which in my case becomes a way of reading violence.

And I use it in terms of assembling a heterogeneous set of actors and affects, indebted to Latour’s concept of compositionism as well.

And the question of language is quite an important part of what I have in mind with composition. And of course, there is a long tradition of attention to language in studies of violence. Unlike exposure which is perhaps indifferent to the object, and assumes that the language of exposure per se is not important (after all it is exposure that is the point) I think composition puts the question of significance at the center; it is, to paraphrase the novelist Coetzee, to wrest control from regimes of significance connected to the state/major. At the same time, I think the question of what lies beyond language, or semiotic regimes is also important; the affective charge of far-right Hindu supremacy and its performativity is a key aspect of its success. For instance, on encountering a violent image or procession, a compositional approach will ask, what are the publics formed by such images and rituals, how do actors insert themselves into its circulation and proliferation, and in that sense, make it political. I find these questions are difficult to ask within the exposure model.

Drew Kerr: Legal documents, on the other hand, do play a central role in Composing Violence and the lives of your interlocutors. Nusrat Chowdhury (2019) in Bangladesh, Akhil Gupta (2012) in North India, and Matthew Hull (2008) in Pakistan have similarly shown how other types of official documents take on lives well beyond what we might evaluate as bureaucratic failures or democratic inefficiencies, demonstrating how documents themselves become affectively charged in particular milieux. You join this conversation with a special emphasis on the human actors involved in and with the document-type of the First Information Report (FIR). Ostensibly a legal and bureaucratic tool promising legibility and due legal process, the FIR, you illustrate, actually accomplishes something quite different. Can you help us understand the FIR as a medium – in the sense of something that “makes society imaginable and intelligible to itself”(Mazzarella 2004) – and the media ecology within which it circulates?

Moyukh Chatterjee: Your question takes me back to graduate school. At the time I was writing my dissertation, some of these exciting new books had come out, and I remember that I was excited to witness the documents/paperwork turn in anthropology; in fact I almost made it the heart of the dissertation, but my advisor helped me to see the larger picture. In line with my interest in language and archives (which was also because of Subaltern Studies), I gravitated towards the power of police acts of interpretation and reporting. I was excited to find that police reports break out of context (what Derrida called iterability and Veena Das has a wonderful essay that uses this idea called the Signature of the State) and circulate in newspaper reports as public information. In fact, this discovery made me realize the extremely limited vocabulary used to describe religious violence in India and its genre-like quality that allowed violence to work like myth. This goes back to your question about the role of the FIR in making certain forms of violence against minorities intelligible as religious fervor and not state-sanctioned pogroms. David Nugent, a wonderful anthropologist of the state and also a member of my dissertation committee, would ask me pointedly, “why are the police recording the violence in the first place?” And as I describe in the book, even the blank FIRs in the archive, the blankness does political work by creating a certain time-space of violence. Overall I was struck by how a dry, technical document like the police’s first information report becomes the key ingredient of newspaper reports (and this must be based on relationships between crime reporters and police officers) that allow what Gyan Pandey has called the colonial master narrative of the communal riot to circulate as what is labeled news. And here, rather than expose the falsity and bias of the FIR (important work accomplished by activists and scholars soon after the violence) I got interested in its power to inscribe a wounded majority and a treacherous minority. In this sense, legal documents get charged by Hindu nationalist politics and are also constitutive of a milieu that produces the Muslim as outsider, communal, and destructive of the national community.

Drew Kerr: Where would you locate this book in relation to the category of the minor you develop throughout your argument? I’m curious for whatever that question might spark for you, but I’m particularly imagining a capacious archive — and the idea of the archive — that houses media about and of violences rendered as communal and religiously divisive in India.

Moyukh Chatterjee: This is such a wonderful question. I wish I could have developed the idea of the minor more expansively in my book. The minor and the minority as a concept, as you know, belongs to a long history, and I have learned from and continue to learn from the work of Talal Asad, Amir Mufti, Qadri Ismail, Ajay Skaria, Gyan Pandey, Faisal Devji, Chulani Kodikara to name only a few people who come to mind. As a concept I wanted to give a sense of the making of the minor and the minority, not simply as numerical categories, but as what does not circulate as the norm or model; that which interrupts the major or can unravel the major; and finally as a binary that is framed and re-framed within the institutional apparatuses and technologies of democracy., including the courtroom and police archive. As David Scott has argued, democracy seems to lock us into thinking that there is only the possibility of minority rule or majority rule, and if the minority position is a position without sovereignty, then part of the fantasy of right-wing movements like Hindu nationalism is to create a permanent majority and minority within a democracy. This has been framed in an earlier classical literature, as “the tyranny of the majority” (Tocqueville). But in terms of my ethnography, I have tried to work out a minor reading of violence, which is not a search for what is hidden or repressed, but what is on the surface of documents, technologies, and practices (like repetition and aggregation) and helps us understand the making of the major, and its artifice. In the book, it takes the form of the minor event, the minor characters who are often overlooked in the mise-en-scene of violence.

Your idea of a capacious archive to document and tell this story of violence is really wonderful. I think it would take the idea of composition seriously to imagine such an archive outside the limits of conventional archival thinking. By which I mean non-narrative and non-chronological ways of representing anti-minority violence or what has been called religious violence. I have been very influenced by artistic work on violence, and perhaps, composition is my way of bringing some of that sensibility into scholarly work. In my fieldsite, I have been speaking to artists and curators, more recently, and thinking with them, this question of the archive. Would it be to map the soundscapes and visual field of this violence or to move away from the archive altogether, and think about how the minor – for instance Muslims and Dalits and Tribals – imagine a life inside and outside Hindu supremacy? When I was growing up in Delhi, this work was done by an organization called SAHMAT. They would create such counter-archives and use art to counter communalism and I think it would be great to reimagine a similar project in our times. Perhaps I will be lucky enough to be part of a project like that in the future.

Thank you so much, Drew, for your questions and patience throughout. I really enjoyed our conversation.

References

Giorgio Agamben. 2000. The Remnants of Auschwitz. (New York: Zone Books).

Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury. 2019. Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh. (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Veena Das. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).

Akhil Gupta. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press).

Matthew Hull. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. (Berkeley: University of California Press).

William Mazzarella. 2004. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33, no. 1: 346.
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan on his book, The Globally Familiar

January 8th, 2024

https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-globally-familiar

Eléonore Rimbault: Much of the energy of The Globally Familiar derives from your candid and involved focus on the young b-boys and rappers you worked with in Delhi. Their everyday experience is a point of departure that leads you and the reader to engage with many longstanding lines of anthropological research. It also informs the concept of the globally familiar that is the central analytic of this book. In a few words, could you explain why the globally familiar emerged as a central idea for this book, and how it reflects the practices and experiences of the youths and artists you spent time with?

E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Thank so much for engaging with the book and for your thoughtful questions! I first started to think about what familiarity and the familiar might mean for my project in early 2013, when I spent time with a couple of branding consultants who were hired by global multinationals interested in cultivating India’s enormous youth market segment. Drawing from 21^st century marketing discourse that has increasingly moved away from marketing products towards inculcating lifestyles, these self-styled experts were charged with fostering the nascent and globally wired youth scenes in the country by curating a series of events in major cities across India (Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi) that featured local b-boys, skateboarders, BMXers, graff artists and so on. In our conversations, the consultants repeatedly used the term familiar to describe the desires and aspirations of young people across the world in relation to consumption, urban space, and practice, specifically youth cultural practices like b-boying or skateboarding.

For these branding consultants, producing the familiar through the events they curated and the digital traces of them that circulated in social media was a way to signal the kind of always already global connectedness between metropolitan centers across nation-state boundaries that has only intensified through digital connection. They did so by mobilizing youth cultural practices and amplifying their aesthetics in the events they curated as well as introducing new ones, hoping they would stick. Something clicked for me in these conversations. I realized the hip hop practitioners in Delhi I spent time with, albeit in a different register and towards different ends, were also producing the familiar through their online and offline practices in ways that put them, their city, and their neighborhoods on the map, so to speak, as global subjects.

Once I got hooked on the concept, I couldn’t stop thinking with it! It did, however, take me a while to write about it as I couldn’t wrap my head, at the time, around how the different spatial and temporal scales these young people traversed – the local, national, the transnational, the past, and the present – coincided and informed one another. I also felt uncomfortable, early on, with utilizing a synthetic term as an explanatory analytic when it wasn’t a term that my hip hop interlocutors were using or a concept within the broader global hip hop lexicon. I finally came to terms with theorizing the familiar, partially because I couldn’t unthink its explanatory power but also and importantly because I felt that it resonated with my experiences in Delhi in ways that were respectful of my youthful participants self-making projects.

Eléonore Rimbault: I was struck by the way your writing about hip hop in Delhi conjures up a portrait of the city that includes so many of the intimate, idiosyncratic, and perhaps, globally not-so-familiar features of this city. Whether it is the transformation and gentrification processes in the Khirki neighborhood, or the routine ways in which people of different class backgrounds have made Delhi’s malls or the metro their own, or the kin networks of hip hop artists and their anchoring in specific neighborhoods of the city, your work is an invitation to think about urban space through people’s engagement with the city. Do you think that the book’s attunement to Delhi can be explained by the street-focused character of hip-hop, or does it have more to do with your approach and your commitments as an anthropologist?

E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: I knew, early on, that I wasn’t interested in writing a book that focused on hip hop cultural production in Delhi in ways that, for instance, narrowly focused on one of its elements (b-boyin’ or MCing, or DJing) or that thought through the media histories between Indian popular cultural forms and the emergent practices of the young men I was getting to know. More to the point, I didn’t want to write a book that either obscured hip hop or over-invested in the micro-specificities of its practice in Delhi and India. I was more interested in how my participants’ mobilization of hip hop’s artistic practices and their media making endeavors for online circulation offered a lens to carefully think about their lives within the changing contours of the city.

Hip hop, of course, lends itself to an engagement with the urban. As a musical, poetic, visual, and kinesthetic genre and discourse of practice that was born in the tumult of structurally produced economic inequality that engulfed the South Bronx in the 1970s, it has been long engaged with the politics and poetics of street life with depictions—both realistic and fantastic—of classed, racialized, and spatialized struggle and projects of emancipation. My participants’ hip hop experimentations—as rappers, graf writers, and dancers—took me metaphorically and physically into Delhi’s intimate and idiosyncratic topographies. Our meanderings through the city offered me an opportunity to think about and, ultimately, write about their vision of and for the city that at once celebrated its particularities even as it strove to make these very same features familiar.

Eléonore Rimbault: The Globally Familiar pays great attention to the technological mediation that conditions the aesthetic of hip-hop in India. Your portrayal of groups of young people hanging out and gathered around their phone screen, for instance, is striking, but your attention to fieldwork-like interactions occurring through social media long after your fieldwork was over is another reminder of how the anthropological method is evolving. As you point out in the book, these moments and modes of sociality are familiar much beyond ethnographic work. Do you think some of your findings on the mediation of a hip-hop aesthetic in South Asia are applicable to other domains of our lives and to professional cultures, such as our own as anthropology professionals?

E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Absolutely, although application can be a tricky thing. I hope the familiar, as I have theorized it in the book, invites engagements within other social domains in ways that recognize and attempt to broadly and specifically think through the profound ways that communications technologies are shifting how we interact with each other and how we imagine the world. To specifically engage with processes of inventive mediation, however, requires a careful appraisal of the particular material, social and political stakes of online/offline participation within designated communities of practice.

For the working-class young men that I worked with in Delhi, producing the familiar was and continues to be a way to stake a claim to the city they grew up in and, crucially, a means to create local and transnational relationships through these claims. An integral part of the individual and collective claims they make through hip hop’s practices is that Delhi is part of a global network of capital that locates racialized, classed, and gendered bodies in ways that are at once recognizable, legible, or familiar, even as they are particular. This process of claiming through creative mediation is generative and, as I show in the book, creates economic, political, and social possibilities for these young men. It might be the case that the familiar, as I have developed the term, doesn’t quite offer the conceptual framing that is required in other worlds of practice and exchange. In that case, new conceptual language needs to be developed. Regardless of the conceptual language we use to theorize processes of digital mediation within specific communities, what I think is important is that we—as ethnographers—attend to the material, political, and social underpinnings and consequences of online communicative and creative practices.

Eléonore Rimbault: From a regionalist standpoint, your attention to the digital mediation of hip-hop sociality and your development of the idea of the globally familiar resonates with previous works conducted in India on mediation and on the global as a scale, including the works of some of the scholars that you cite, such as Arjun Appadurai, Arvind Rajagopal, William Mazzarella, and several others. It seems like the conceptual work on the global in India closely tracks the transformation of the media through which ideas, politics, and aesthetics are produced and reproduced. How do you position your book in relation to these other ways of articulating the immanence of a global scale, and do you think there is something about Indian cities as locales that prompts this form of theorization?

E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: I would caution against approaching a particular socio-historic context, in this case India, as more conducive to theorizations of global mediation than other places in the world. This sort of approach reminds me of a bit of apocrypha that I first encountered in graduate school many years ago and again, in the British social anthropology worlds I traversed when I was based in London. In this 20^th century anthropological formulation young, enthusiastic anthropologists from across Europe and North America were encouraged to study certain themes or topics in certain parts of the world – hierarchy in South Asia, exchange and gift economies in the Pacific, political systems in Africa, and so on. One’s theoretical interests, in short, determined where one went to do fieldwork.

Perhaps another way of framing this discussion – rather than thinking about how particular places are more amenable to certain theoretical potentials— is to think carefully about the relationship between fieldwork and citation. Undoubtedly, before and during fieldwork I was influenced by reading all the tremendous thinkers you named who, together, have developed a rich media anthropology of global India. In addition, there were many other media/visual anthropologists working in India that also shaped (and continue to influence) my thinking. For instance, Chris Pinney’s work on visual cultures in India, Frank Cody and Sahana Udupa’s work on the news, AmandaWeidman’s work on practices of distinction amongst Carnatic musicians, and Teja Ganti’s careful and sustained work on Hindi cinema worlds have all pushed me to broaden and specify my thinking around my encounters in Delhi. However, I couldn’t solely engage and carefully think with these scholars who have worked in India or the region around questions of mediation and cultural production.

My unique challenge and responsibility, given that I was trying to understand why young racialized men in Delhi were somewhat suddenly picking up digital hip hop to create new self-descriptions, social worlds, and economic opportunities, was to carefully engage with hip hop scholarship, specifically, and Black Atlantic scholarship more broadly, particularly the work that has focused on the African diasporic arts and its spread across the globe. For me what was at stake in my book project centered on bringing these distinct bodies of scholarship into conversation in a carefully calibrated relationship to what I was witnessing and participating in on the ground in ways that animated the otherwise obscured colonial underpinnings of the global in India. So, while all of the scholars you mentioned were incredibly important, particularly in the years before fieldwork where I was voraciously reading everything I could to prepare myself, my fieldwork demanded a different engagement with immanence that put race, gender, and place across colonial geographies at the forefront of my thinking.

Eléonore Rimbault: Finally, I am wondering if you had some thoughts you’d like to share on the way hip hop has developed more recently in Delhi and/or India. Do you see the affirmation of caste, class and ethnic identities in South Indian hip hop (for instance) as re-articulation of the Hip-Hop ideologies you identified circa 2012? More broadly, what are your thoughts on the current circulation of desi hip hop outside of Delhi, for instance, in South India, or on Punjabi hip-hop produced in Canada?

E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Thanks for this question. There is a lot to say on this but try I’ll keep my response concise. There have been enormous shifts and changes in what can now be described as an Indian hip hop scene since I finished fieldwork in 2014. First and foremost, mainstream hip hop music production has exploded in the last several years as Indian diasporic entrepreneurs, transnational media conglomerates, and more recently, big players in Indian popular cultural worlds, have invested in its potential. As a result, several of the MCs I met in Delhi who were just getting started when I met them and whom I helped produce their first YouTube videos have been catapulted to fame. Their rise to stardom, of course, has had a direct impact on their younger peers who see and want to emulate their success.

With the release of Gully Boy in 2019, a blockbuster production from Zoya Akhtar, the aspiration for hip hop fame across the country has increased ten-fold. Set in Dharavi, Mumbai, commonly referred to as the largest slum in Asia, Gully Boy narrates the coming-of-age story of Murad, a young Muslim man who rapidly transforms from hip hop enthusiast to local hip hop sensation. Gully Boy, with its constant referencing and aestheticization of music and video production for social-media circulation as key aspects of hip-hop potentiality in the contemporary moment, captures, albeit in clichéd ways, some of the affective sensibility of the globally familiar. The film’s success in India and globally also offers an example of the ways in which marginalized masculinities and the spatialities they index in India are currently being imagined and mobilized by mainstream media interests to produce capital and cultivate desire.

With the commercial success and increasing visibility of Indian rap, there has been an explosion of MCs across the country who hone and practice their skills in local ciphas while producing content for social media circulation. What I have been most excited about is how these emergent rappers have embraced the poetics of hip hop as a modality to be explored in their local languages. When I first arrived to Delhi in 2011 to check out the scene, the rappers I met were trying to rap in English and, at best, were switching between Hindi and English in their raps. Since 2013 there has been a decided move towards rappin’ exclusively in Hindi, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu and so on. The move towards rappin’ in regional languages has opened up new and exciting opportunities to bring together localized musical and poetic traditions with hip hop which, of course, opens up new intellectual and ethnographic projects. I’m really excited for the work of Pranathi Diwakar, for instance, who has explored how young people have combined Gaana musical traditions preserved by Dalit communities in Tamil Nadu with hip hop to produce a new sound that elucidates the politics of caste in a contemporary frame. For Dr. Diwakar, that has offered opportunities to theorize caste, race, and the politics of space in Chennai in ways that are productive and grounded. It’s worth mentioning there was a precedent for hip hop’s linguistic localization in the Punjabi hip hop/bhangra scene, which has a longer relationship – through its diaspora – with Atlantic world cultural formations. But that story, like the work by Dr. Diwakar, is for another time and for another scholar!

The point that I suppose I’m trying to make is that even as hip hop has become a commodity form in the subcontinent, it has also continued to be a viable vehicle for political and social expression that is cognizant of and takes up older cultural forms. As such, hip hop continues its fifty plus year career of unashamedly taking up a capitalist hustle while offering opportunities for its practitioners to explore and critique the normative order while voraciously reanimating and remixing locally available sounds and images. Of course, political expression, critiques of power, and inventive cultural bricolage are not always something to be celebrated. Over the last several years I’ve been tracking the shift in tenor and tone of several of my participants, who have turned towards the so-called decolonial promise of Hindutva. I’m currently writing a piece with my long-term collaborator and friend, Jaspal Naveel Singh, about how the elections in 2014 that brought the BJP into power at the national level have impacted in the nascent Indian hip hop scene. Over the years, some of the key figures in the scene have begun to celebrate a Hindu centric right-wing aesthetic and political sensibility in their creative endeavors and public engagements. This has, unsurprisingly, created rifts amongst practitioners. We are grappling with how to tell this story in a way that elucidates something about how ideology inculcates itself in peoples’ world views in real time and the multiple effects of these shifts in perspective and stance. All this to say, what I gestured to in the book as hip hop ideologies – specifically focusing on the ways external and often diasporic actors shaped, in the early days of the scene, the ways in which social difference should be approached and represented through hip hop – has become multiple and localized in ways that are complex and require further attention and study.
Nishaant Choksi on his book, Graphic Politics in Eastern India

December 11th, 2023

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/graphic-politics-in-eastern-india-9781350159587/

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:    Your fascinating book argues that script serves as a “critical semiotic modality through which Santali speakers assert temporal and spatial autonomy from hegemonic historical narratives, administrative territories, and dominant class and caste based social orders” (26). The concept of autonomy is very central to the book. Can you speak about how a graphic politics of autonomy is distinct from identity or state-based politics of recognition that have, perhaps, been more frequently been addressed in linguistic anthropological work?

Nishaant Choksi: First of all, thank you so much for the interview, and giving me a chance to discuss my work with you and the CAMP audience. Yes, you are right, I have deliberately tried to avoid using the words ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ in the book and instead tried to outline the concept of autonomy. It is not like the struggle that the proponents of Santali language and Ol-Chiki undertook was not about identity or recognition, it certainly was. However, these notions in terms of political vocabulary are relatively recent in India, and they also, as many anthropologists have discussed, come with analytical limitations. Instead, I draw on a longer discourse of autonomy among the communities I worked with which was tied to the struggle for Jharkhand, which was a long-running struggle among indigenous communities in eastern India to have a federal region with an indigenous majority that would have a specifically indigenous political and cultural character. The struggle was both spatial in that it focused on territory, and temporal, in that it sought to emancipate the Adivasi (original inhabitants) from a temporal discourse of backwardness and primitiveness. The area of West Bengal state in eastern India where I did my fieldwork was left out of the eventual Jharkhand state but the assertion for script in this area, I found, had many continuities with the struggle for Jharkhand. While interfacing with the state for resources and institutions for Santali language and script, the discourse might revolve around identity or recognition, the everyday graphic politics practiced in the rural areas where I did fieldwork revolved more around the conceptual fulcrum of autonomy.

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:  While many scholars treat writing as a secondary reflection of speech, your book focuses specifically on the graphic politics afforded by the invention and circulation of the Ol-Chiki script. What does your attention to script and multiscriptality reveal beyond what a study attending primarily to language and multilingualism might find?

Too often the study of writing systems has been conflated with that of language, drawing from, as you rightly point out, the idea that writing is a secondary reflection of speech. In this book, I try to intervene by analytically separating script from language (by language I mean ‘code’ or ‘oral variety’). In doing so, I see how script carries different semiotic significations from a linguistic variety, which is important when analyzing languages written in multiple scripts. Starting from this vantage point also allows us to see under what conditions a script becomes ideologically tied to code, and what the significance of the script is for readers and speakers of a language beyond the fact that it represents a particular language. For instance, the Eastern Brahmi script is ideologically tied to the Bengali language in West Bengal, although it is also used to write Santali, which places Santali written in the Eastern Brahmi script in an inferior position to Bengali. This is one of the arguments used for the argument that an independent script such as Ol-Chiki is needed for the Santali language. Yet, Eastern Brahmi is also the most accessible script for Santali speakers and readers, and therefore it is highly visible in the linguistic landscape and in certain types of Santali-language media, where it carries different significations, such as that of local territorial affiliations and literary culture for Santali-speaking communities residing in West Bengal. Understanding the layered and complex signification of script and its multiple relationships with a particular linguistic code was not possible within prevailing analytical frameworks that focused on multilingualism alone.

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:  In Chapter 2, you describe a moment in which, noticing a diagram chalked at the entrance of a Santali household, you were told that the marks were writing (ol) but not symbol (chiki). This moment is suggestive of Santali semiotic ideologies about the potential properties, functions, and social indexicalities of writing that differ significantly from understandings of the nature and purposes of writing held by missionaries, state administrators, and other institutional figures Santali speakers encounter. Can you speak a bit about how variously positioned Santali writers understood and deployed Ol-Chiki?

Yes, as I argued in Chapter 2, the originator of Ol-Chiki script, Pandit Raghunath Murmu, had incorporated ritual elements into the graphic construction and rationale for the script that drew a much older practice of writing/drawing or what in Santali is called ol. The same went for other Santali intellectuals and writers who created their own distinct scripts, for instance the famous Santali poet Sadhu Ramchand Murmu also based his script, Monj Dander Ank, on ritual writing and “divine sound” (ishrong). These scripts were both modern in that they represented spoken language, but also departed from the notion that writing was an arbitrary representation of speech that informs modern regimes of literacy. Scriptmaking, I suggest, emerged in the Santali-speaking area at a time when many of the leading intellectuals of the community were experimenting with ways of how to usher the community into modern regimes of literacy and education while also preserving community values and histories. Ol-Chiki was the most successful of these new scripts to emerge during this period but despite its success, was not immediately accepted by all. Many writers still value the Roman script, while other senior writers preferred writing in regional scripts like Eastern Brahmi so their writing could be made more accessible to the widest possible audience. However, as technology changed and the politics of autonomy became more identified with the graphic domain, most writers under 50 in my field area have more fully embraced Ol-Chiki as the most appropriate script for writing Santali literature.

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: In Chapter 5, while focusing on the role of print media, you introduce what you call the “Jharkhand imagination,” which challenges both Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities and theories of Indian nationalism. Could you elaborate on the concept and how it intervenes in these frameworks?

Nishaant Choksi: Anderson’s concept of imagined communities is useful in that it provides a way that we can incorporate “imagination” into our social scientific analysis, seeing how collectives can exist beyond the present status-quo, both temporally and spatially, and allows us a way to examine how media, specifically, facilitates that imagination. It is limiting in that, as many linguistic anthropologists have argued, its notion of imagination is flat and homogenous, based on a presumption of a monolingual reality. In the study of South Asia, the concept has come under criticism, famously by Partha Chatterjee, who argued that the Indian elite had a simultaneously spiritual domain of what constituted the nation, based on writings in Bengali, and material domain oriented toward the British imperial power, based on the English language. This division between English and what is viewed as the vernacular has been constant in the linguistic understanding of South Asian nationalisms and sub-nationalisms.

Such formulations do not adequately explain the multiscriptal, multilingual milieu of eastern India where I did my fieldwork. Print media was very important for Santali-language activists and writers, but the articulations of community were highly varied depending on what genre of media, and what combinations of script and language they used. Magazines and newspapers had different aims, for example, and they used different linguistic and graphic resources to fulfill these aims. “Jharkhand” as it was imagined in the regional media, especially the multilingual and multriscriptal newspapers which I discuss in the chapter, as a space not identified with any language or script, but with the idea of a convivial and co-eval multilingualism and multiscriptality. Hence the project challenged the idea of linguistic uniformity as a basis of shared community as well as the concept of a hierarchically ordered bilingualism that informs studies of Indian nationalism.

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:     You note in the book that digital media use has proliferated among Santali speakers since your research began in 2010. You offer an analysis of the role Ol-Chiki had begun to play on digital media during the period covered in the book, but I wonder if you can speak to any changes following this period in how digital media has been drawn into the scalar work through which Santali and other Adivasi groups create autonomous spaces that extend beyond state lines?

Exactly, so much has changed since 2010-2011 which is when I conducted my long-term fieldwork on which this book is based. At that time hardly anyone (including myself) had a smart phone. Carrying my laptop and a USB dongle, I was one of the few people who even had an internet connection. My research assistant had never even heard of email, much less social media. In the years I have been back, mobile smart phones have revolutionized the communicative situation, and now so many people, both young and old, have access to the internet and are communicating with each other through messages and social media. Filming which used to take place with cameras and VCDs has now become extended to anyone with a phone. Choices of script, which before had to be written by hand, or if typed, given to a specialist who knew typing, can now be accessed and changed at one’s fingertips. Ol-Chiki is even available as a Google font. YouTube channels also abound with Ol-Chiki script displayed prominently in the videos. I suggest the digital transformation hasn’t reduced the importance of script, and print media is still important though it is supplemented and complemented with digital media now. Moreover, digital media provides new platforms where the script can be used to different ends. I have written a little about this in the book, and more substantially in a separate journal article and a book chapter, but there is so much more to explore on the subject. I think for the study of indigenous languages in South Asia and elsewhere, this will be the most important area of research in the coming years.

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:  Who are you most hoping to address in this book and what do you most want readers to take away from it?

Nishaant Choksi: Originally when I wrote the book, I had in mind primarily the research and student community in anthropology, linguistics, South Asian Studies, and indigenous studies. I wanted to place the study of script and writing front and center in the study of South Asian languages, an area still underexplored given the vast diversity of writing systems. In addition, I had hoped to contribute to the development of the study of the graphic from a linguistic anthropological standpoint, a field that has really picked up in recent years, much more than when I started my graduate studies. Thirdly, India’s Adivasi (indigenous) communities are primarily identified with oral culture and oral tradition, and this is one of the few scholarly books discussing the Adivasi communities in terms of their writing practices and encounter with literacy. For both Adivasi scholars and those working on Adivasi communities, I am happy to see that it has had some impact.

Finally, it is nice to see sometimes when you write a book it goes beyond your intended audience. For instance, I had no idea that the graphic design community would find this book useful, but recently a font designer who has worked on developing culturally sensitive Indian language fonts read my book and interviewed me for a documentary, for which he also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand in Santali villages. I have also received an invitation to speak about the book to a design group focusing on indigenous design. It is a positive development that our work as anthropologists can also have influence in other kinds of fields, and because of the book and the conversations I have had around it, I was also able to expand my own intellectual and creative horizons.
Frank Cody on his book, The News Event

September 21st, 2023

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo190464205.html

Shikhar Goel: Describe for us some intellectual motivations behind writing this book. What were some significant moments that led you to this book project?

Francis Cody: This book came out of a longstanding interest in news media circulation and publics that I had already developed while doing research in rural South India for my dissertation. But after a few articles that I wrote based on fieldwork done during that time, I still had a very vague understanding of where I wanted to go with the materials I was collecting until I realized that I was increasingly dissatisfied with how the literature on publics was so thoroughly grounded in liberal political theory. This was the case even among the most important critics of liberalism. And since I was approaching questions about democracy and the public sphere from postcolonial theory and the literature on populism, I saw an opportunity to intervene. The occasion for this was an article, later published as a book chapter in an edited volume, that I was asked to write on the theme of media and utopia by the wonderful media scholar, Arvind Rajagopal. By examining how crowds of angry supporters of political leaders attacked newspaper offices when their leader had been defamed in the press, and how newspaper editors published articles with the potential for such attacks to occur in mind, I was able to show the co-constitutive relationship that had developed between crowd violence and print capitalism, thereby undermining some of the key binaries underpinning liberal theories of publicity.

My interests had moved past liberalism or its postcolonial critics to hone in on political logics of event-making and spectacle. And from that starting point, I took my lead from the reporters I was becoming close to.   I paid special attention to how limits were imposed to control what could be published as news, and how those limits were sometimes used as opportunities to amplify the importance of an event when newsmakers chose to breach them. For example, all the journalists I talked to complained of the government’s overzealous application of criminal defamation laws or the degree to which judges were likely to charge a journalist with contempt of court if they were unhappy with how they were being portrayed. And yet, I noticed that they would continue to publish news items that drew these charges, and some even appeared attract such charges on purpose for the sake of their own publicity. I saw this dynamic unfold across a range of contexts, echoing what I had learned about crowd violence against journalists, and I began to realize that this kind of amplification turning into a positive feedback loop was, in fact, becoming a focal topic of my research. Another significant moment that led to this project was a workshop on law and media technology organized by the Sarai project at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. It was there that I was able to begin to interpret what I saw happening around me in Chennai with the help of media scholars who had actually studied law and even among lawyers who were arguing before the Supreme Court of India to decriminalize things like defamation or to stop the government from attacking critics with sedition charges. I was motivated by these encounters, where the need for legal reform is quite clear, to try to put these questions in a wider sociological and historical frame.

Shikhar Goel: What would be some key contributions that you think this book makes to the existing literature in the field of media anthropology in South Asia and beyond?

Francis Cody: Beyond having reopened the question of political publicity from a new angle, I hope that the concept of the “news event” I develop over the course of the book will be useful to think through a range of topics. News media become event-makers in their own right, thereby blurring the distinction between events in the world being represented in the news and the event of news representation itself. And this ubiquitous phenomenon is at the center of our concerns about misinformation in the age of digitalization, for very good reasons. The fact of an event’s communicability – its capacity to circulate widely, thereby producing value and the production of circulation itself as an event – has eclipsed news media’s power to communicate something about the world outside of itself for many. But this should also remind us of some much older arguments, like Baudrillard’s claims about the “implosion of meaning in media,” or critical theory’s claims about the “culture industry” and how news is part of a much larger transformation in media circulation. These are long-standing concerns that have taken on new urgency in our times because of the obvious connections between transformations in technologies of circulation and the rise of populist attacks on traditional structures of representation, both in formal politics and in news media.

What I would like to think I have contributed with the concept of the news event is a way to ask empirical questions about these very abstract theoretical claims – assertions that have often been made without much evidence. By taking seriously the politics that continue to unfold under the regime of what Jodi Dean terms “communicative capitalism,” my focus on the news event allows me actually track, through events that are as real as they are virtual, how positive feedback loops emerge, and why news makers pursue the politics of communicability at particular historical conjunctures. The stakes in understanding these phenomena are obviously high in South Asia, with the dominance of highly mediatized anti-democratic regimes in India or Bangladesh, as they are in many other places. The advantage that comes with having studied these problems in a place like Tamil Nadu, India, is that political actors have been remarkably reflexive about the mediatization of politics there, and have purposefully pursued power through the production of news media from the very beginning of the Dravidian movement that has dominated electoral politics for over half a century. But digitalization is playing a large role in the rapid transformations in Tamil politics as it is everywhere. I am developing the concept of the news event in a context everyone is highly conscious of the power and limits of news representation in creating a political climate. I am also aiming to provide a methodological model of how one might do this kind of media anthropology that is grounded in place, but which does not necessarily follow traditional models of ethnographic research and writing.

Shikhar Goel: Our readers might be curious to know more about your choice of working with “event as a method” in this book. How did you zero in on it, were there any competing alternatives you had experimented with during your research?

Francis Cody: My method of tracking events and logics of event-making to raise questions about the media politics of our time took a while to develop. And it draws inspiration from at least two very different traditions of thinking about the event. I really had no idea what I was looking for when beginning to do ethnographic research among news consumer and journalists, in addition to spending time in newspaper archives. But I was driven by a general sense that political sovereignty is mediated by news media and it is for this reason that political parties and other activists trying to change the world were so invested in how they are represented in the news and in trying to mold that image. I was working as a sort of second generation among media anthropologists, as a number of studies were being published at the time about particular news organizations or about particular media technologies. I realized that this study would have to be multi-sited in an institutional sense and multi modal in the sense of tracking news circulation across media such as newspapers, television, and the then emergent world of online publication and social media, especially WhatsApp. Books that immediately inspired me in terms of method were asking big questions beyond the study a particular media house, like Amahl Bishara’s critique of “objectivity” under conditions of war and occupation among Palestinian journalists, and Zeynep Devrim Gürsel’s study of how digitalization was transforming the way news photographs were circulating and representing the world.

Tracing the event started as a methodology to answer questions I had about how political power was mediated by news representation before it eventually became a concept to be theorized more abstractly. I draw on Veena Das’s concept of the “critical event” which she developed to understand how an anthropologist might engage with large questions about community, kinship, and the nation when these very categories were being thrown into question in the context of national crises. While many of the events discussed in the book are for less significant than those that fall under this category, the method of paying attention to the contours of contestation that are drawn when certain thresholds of social norms are crossed by news media or the politicians they report on was very powerful. The other concept that became important, much later when writing the book, was Bernard Stiegler’s idea of “event-ization” which he develops to capture the processes through which the distinction between a storyline and that which it is reporting on collapses as a result of media saturation. It appealed to my own sense that methodology must be ground in a processual approach to how events of representation become events of historical importance, and it captured that blurring of the distinction between the world represented in the news and the world of news representation that I saw happening all around me in the world of journalism in Tamil Nadu.

Shikhar Goel: This book pushes scholars across fields and disciplines to relook at some of their established assumptions and concepts by elegantly emplacing media as a fundamental constitutive building block for critical theory in the contemporary. At the same time, the term media itself has promiscuously and generatively become a placeholder for a galaxy of objects, concepts, and phenomena in the academy. What were some challenges that you faced as an anthropologist while working with a term like media that has come to engender such wide-ranging theoretical possibilities?

Francis Cody: You’ve put your finger on a very important problem, there is a sort of impasse that has arisen between media studies and anthropology. One the one hand, media as an explicit topic of study has receded into the background of much of anthropology compared to ten or fifteen years ago. I suspect that the question of alterity, which still drives so much of anthropological research in North America at least, is not as easy to ground in studies of technologies that are increasingly shared across the globe. This has happened at a time when ethnography is much more highly mediatized than ever before, where a great deal of anthropological research takes place online, for example. Media studies, on the other hand, has moved from seeing media, like television, digital media, and so on, as a kind of ecology within which culture grows to treating clouds, water, and so other elements of organic and inorganic matter as media in their own right. But too often, this kind of ecology-as-media approach grounds itself in a rereading of the European philosophical canon that treats the rest of world as having empirical interest but nothing much to offer in the way of theory. There is, furthermore, a sometimes anti-humanist ethos in some corners of media studies that is hostile to questions about the public sphere, or even to questions of meaning and interpretation, questions I have found to be of such central interest to my research.

So, there’s a fairly large disciplinary divide. At the same time, some of the hang-ups anthropologists have had about human agency and the problem of technological determinism have receded as well, opening the way for a greater appreciation for the scale-making qualities of media infrastructure and the technologically distributed quality of agency. So, in that sense, this is a fortuitous time to develop a media anthropology that is more tune with developments happening elsewhere in the world of critical theory. And doing so from the perspective of concerns arising out of recent transformations in India’s media ecology has the added advantage of avoiding many of the teleological assumptions about techno-social change that continue to undergird a media theory machine that remains incredibly Eurocentric. You see this in some of the literature on machine learning, for example. I’m interested in making general claims about media as a fundamental constitutive building block for critical theory in the contemporary, as you put it so elegantly, from an India-based point of view that doesn’t need to argue its importance by claiming that this the future of the global North, another Occidentalist teleology we continue to find in anthropology. This is precisely about the contemporary!

Shikhar Goel: Law, both inside and outside the courtroom, emerges as your key ethnographic site in this book. The existing literature across disciplines of history, critical legal studies, and media studies among others in South Asia and elsewhere suggests that law and media share a constitutive relationship, where law emerges as an always already mediatized entity. What is then unique to this equation between law and media in the contemporary moment where digital technology with its robust circulation engines has come to dominate our mediascapes? How do you read the mutating relationship between law and media through time?

Francis Cody: As the scholarship from India and elsewhere shows, this co-constitutive relationship between law and media is old. It runs through cinematic representations of law and the legal regulation of cinema to our age of live reporting on legal procedure and legal attempts to shield the judiciary from the glare of instant publicity. Of course, courtroom events form a great deal of news content. But what I was struck by in my research is how often media are discussed in legal judgements and how much the judiciary is concerned with the influence of news media on the course of legal proceedings.

             The problem of “trial by media” has become much more acute as the time lag between media reporting and the slow pace of legal procedure appears to stretch further and further. At the same time, police often play an important role in bypassing legal procedure by feeding evidence to television news channels, maybe because of the public pressures for the speedy delivery of some sort of justice (which is often profoundly unjust). One of the genres that I’m writing about at the moment is that of the mass forensic event where CCTV camera footage and postmortem reports are endlessly analyzed by news anchors and the news consuming publics. These kinds of evidence often ground very disturbing media trials where the criminality of certain types of people is decided upon ahead of time, and then seems to be corroborated by these kinds of indexical traces of violence, all before the courts are able to provide a procedural framework for weighing the value of evidence. At a more general level, if the legal system always played a large role in regulating what could appear on news media, it appears that news media are playing much stronger role now in determining the meanings, and even outcomes of trials. If we are already concerned with how political influence has hurt the independence of the judiciary, we should extremely worried about how the compulsions of communicative capitalism, coupled with corporate and political influence on news reporting, are driving the ways that the media environment conditions the life of law.
Eléonore Rimbault takes the p. 99 test

September 18th, 2023

No matter the size of shows, and the actual count of the public, the Indian circus works hard to appear larger-than-life. The image of the circus, in other words, is in many ways larger than the show itself, the publicity that fuels it traveling ahead and enticing expectant crowds before a company’s arrival. The circus and its image bleed into each other, they exist symbiotically; when one is attacked, the other suffers with it.

In my dissertation, I track the ongoing disappearance of the circus in India as performances get associated with accusations that prove increasingly difficult to shrug off, including charges of animal mistreatment.

On P. 99, I locate one such shift in the public’s perception of the circus to a period from 1988 to 1998. Drawing from reports and opinion pieces appearing mainly in the Times of India, I track animal rights NGOs’ strategies as they shifted from earlier suits against individual street performers and animal tamers to large-scale reports and rescue operations targeting itinerant circus companies. Because the public did not tend to differentiate between one company and another, these strategies ultimately led to the entire profession being seen as complicit, at all levels, in the mistreatment of animals.

Caption (translated from Malayalam): This circus bear rides a motorcycle by himself

Source: Mathrubhumi weekly, January 1955.

P. 99 also notes the class disparities that mark the stark divide between the ideals of interspecies ethics that exist among circus practitioners and the more abstract notions of humane treatment and harm stipulated by members of animal rights organizations removed from the material conditions of work with animals.

Interestingly, both sides play upon the image of animals and humans working side by side in the circus foregrounded by circus publicity: one in the name of sociality, the other in the name of exploitation. Both also invoke the motif of the circus’s disappearance to their own end—one to harken back to the circus’s former glory and bestow upon it the mantle of an expiring art form, the other to look forward to a future in which its practices have been definitively relegated to the past.

Ironically, I claim, both sides, in insisting on the circus’s disappearance, have contributed in their way to sustain the ongoing presence of this performance, whose survival now seems predicated precisely on its being an object of dispute, always disappearing, yet never out of view.

Eléonore Rimbault. 2022. Disappearance in the Ring: The Perpetual Unmaking of India’s Big Top Circus. University of Chicago Phd.
Shaila Seshia Galvin discusses her book, Becoming Organic

July 3rd, 2023

Interview by Ziya Kaya

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215014/becoming-organic

Ziya Kaya: In your book, Becoming Organic, you take us to various sites of pre- and post-agricultural production activities in the Indian Himalaya where organic as a quality is getting formed. Your book meticulously makes the familiar strange by approaching organic farming as more than an observable property or commodity, a global trend, and a response to industrial farming. Could you please tell us more about the focus and the main arguments of the book? How does such an attempt to make the familiar strange in organic production bring together different bodies of literature?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: I appreciate you bringing up the idea of making the familiar strange in relation to organic. This was one of the important points of departure for me, as I embarked on this study as a doctoral student. At the time, in the US in the early 2000s, I could observe directly how organic food was becoming more prominent in certain US foodscapes – there were a growing number of farmers markets selling organic or local food, as well as dedicated sections and trademarked organic brands. I was interested too in the way that people like Michael Pollan were writing about organic farming, and drew inspiration from Julie Guthman’s study of organic agriculture in California. What stood out for me was the way that organic agriculture was often posited as a response to or antidote for industrialized modes of agricultural production, and the way that food and land under organic production were seen to be more natural. In many ways, it appeared as though organic was understood as a material property of food and land.

When you talk about making the familiar strange, I suppose what my book is doing is pushing against the way that organic is often taken to be a property of land and its produce, a property that is often marked by the absence of prohibited chemicals and fertilizers. For example, when one talks about an organic carrot, for example, or an organic seed, or in Uttarakhand, organic rice, there is often a sense that accompanies the term “organic” that it is either something that inheres in it, or that is marked by the absence of prohibited chemical inputs like fertilizers, herbicides, pesitcides, and GMOs. Instead, I am trying to show how organic is something that is actively produced and assembled, and in the book I trace how this happens by examining ethnographically the range of practices that help bring into being as a quality of land and produce; a quality that is not fixed or inherent, but that must be cajoled, negotiated, and maintained.

Ziya Kaya: You follow power discrepancies and struggles in the Indian Himalaya through the opposition between the concepts of ‘organic by default’ and ‘organic by design’. Some farmers go with the former and others with the latter due to their different historical, ecological, economic, and political conditions. However, it seems that state representatives mostly abide by the latter with the motivation to marketize farmers’ produce even when they sometimes bring the two together. I am wondering if you encountered any state employees, NGOs or so-called ‘experts’ who question, if not challenge, the standards of organic by design that also require farmers to do farming with certificates and contracts?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: That is a great question, and really insightful because it speaks exactly to the kinds of frictions and tensions around the idea of organic that I encountered during my fieldwork and that I have tried to capture in the book. For state officials and for many farmers who participated in the program, the distinction between being organic by default and organic by design was a crucial one, arguably just as crucial as the distinction between organic and conventional agricultural production. And while, on the whole, these distinctions were upheld, I did encounter some who questioned it. For example, a local NGO worker remarked to me one day that it seemed necessary to have a concrete compost pit to be considered organic; that having a compost pit was a criteria for being organic. This attuned me to the ways that physical structures such as these embodied material semiotic significance, and worked to produce particular ideas about what organic farming is and about who in a community practices it. Often, though, it was farmers themselves who were most attuned to these nuances and who, at times, questioned them. Some described to me how one of the markers of being organic for them was keeping their compost in a pit, rather than simply in a pile by the side of the field. While this might seem mundane, it’s important to underscore that a concrete compost pit does require considerable outlays of money and labour, which not all households can avail.

Ziya Kaya: Several disciplines mostly narrate farmers and their ecologies in different parts of the world through the account of clear-cut domination of the local by the global. However, the concepts that haunt me in your book are ‘uncertainty’ (p. 77) and ‘agency’ (p. 49). These concepts are significant for reminding us that farmers and nonhumans are not passive players in agriculture even though it seems that they are dominated in the ecological and economic context. I believe that they reveal how corporation-oriented and global development projects are indeed dependent on the agency or the autonomy of the farmers and their ecologies which are always relational and under construction. Do you think this kind of ethnographic focus on what you call ‘minute work’ (p. 42) of farming, instead of starting and ending up with a story of the dominant and the dominated, can challenge the actors of the large-scale industrial agriculture to revise their programs that ignore various local dynamics (history, ecology, gender, caste, and age)?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: You are right to point out the way that the book foregrounds the kind of uncertainty, ambivalence, and agency farmers in Uttarakand harbored toward the organic enterprise. Indeed, against a narrative that sees smallholder farmers as dominated by global agribusiness and contract farming, one of the most interesting aspects of my fieldwork was coming to learn how farmers navigated within, through, around, and against what can sometimes appear as a hegemonic global system. Organic producers that I met in the Doon Valley, for example, were incredibly thoughtful about their participation in the organic program. At the same time, I find it important to remember the frameworks within which smallhoders operate, frameworks that favour things like standardization, certification and that do powerfully shape situated local ecologies. In Dehradun, for example, almost all basmati rice grown in the Valley is now exported to such an extent that residents of Dehradun have great difficulty purchasing rice grown just a few miles away. Producers, on the other hand, must abide by standards for export quality basmati that have resulted in declining cultivation of local varieties and landraces of aromatic rice. Structural processes, shaped among other things through the work of state actors and wider regulatory environments, are very important. What interests me is the way that these structural dynamics and processes are maintained, enacted, reproduced through everyday practice while also attending to the ways in which they are never totalizing as people continue to work around and against them.

Ziya Kaya: As your book attests, we talk about various actors other than state officials and farmers in today’s agriculture. As I observe in my own research on digital farming in Turkey, these actors always underline the necessity of educating farmers in order to standardize agriculture. What kinds of agricultural education programs did you witness in your research on organic farming? What do you and the farmers think about these programs? Do we need or can we imagine different programs that can be an alternative to education-oriented agricultural projects?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: It’s really interesting to hear about your experience in Turkey, and the prominence of a discourse of educating farmers. This is definitely something that I observed in my research in Uttarakhand in different ways and it is definitely connected to much longer histories of agricutural extension in the region. Agricultural extension has been important for the diffusion of particular technologies; in India, the Green Revolution exemplifies this. But extension is also about the making of agrarian subjects. That is to say, agricultural extension has very much been about a model of farmer education, field schools, demonstration farmers or “show farmers” as Andrew Flachs has also written about. Education programs have often been connected to ideas of progress and improvement, in India they can also mark differences between farmers who are considered by some in scientific and policy communities to be “progressive” and those that are deemed “backward.”

Agricultural education took different forms in Uttarakhand when it came to organic agriculture. The organic commodity board organized trainings for farmers, particularly around things like composting. These trainings had mixed reception, after all the principles of composting are ones very much familiar to farmers in this region – the use of manure from ruminant animals, of their stall bedding, of crop residues. In some cases, farmers expressed how the methods in which they were trained were not appropriate to their practices of farming or their religious and cultural beliefs; in others, they asserted their own expertise over that of composting techniques introduced by the organic board. But, as you say, other actors are also present in many of today’s agrarian settings, and in the Doon Valley I also observed the role that the private rice retailer played in a kind of agricultural education. This education had a specific aim, for it was about both producing and maximizing yield but also about producing rice that would meet the export-quality standards I mentioned earlier. It was through this kind of education that the company worked to ensure that it would obtain rice not only of a certain quantity but a certain quality.

Ziya Kaya: Lastly, let me ask you a couple of questions about your method, sites, and fieldwork. How did you decide to study organic farming in the first place and where did your ethnographic research take you? Did you have any challenges and questions at the beginning of your research regarding the sites and the topic? If so, how did you deal with these kinds of questions? When I read the sentence from your book, ‘Nor was it always clear to me what it was that I was following’, I felt that it is exactly what I am going through right now in my field site and I thought some other anthropologists might have similar experiences. In what ways does the lack of a clear itinerary of a research journey contribute to our understanding of multi-sited fieldwork?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: Thank you for this question! Yes, the prospect of embarking on fieldwork, and multi-sited fieldwork, can be quite daunting. I was fortunate to have been welcomed to the organic commodity board, but it was less clear to me what rural locales I could or should work in. Given the sharp differences in Uttarakhand between agriculture located in the sub-Himalayan region of the Doon Valley, and that up in the hills, I wanted to explore connections and differences in how organic unfolded across these locales. These kinds of ideas gave a framework and sense of direction for my fieldwork, but there was still a lot of navigating to do and not a turn-by-turn itinerary that I simply followed. There were more than a few periods of being unsure about what it was I was focused on and where all of it would lead. It was actually only later that I appreciated more fully that what I was, or had, been following was the idea of organic itself. Strangely, this wasn’t apparent to me in my initial framings of the problem in my doctoral proposal, it wasn’t what I had set out to do, and it wasn’t even a strong focus of my dissertation. So, I suppose, what I have learned from this is that part of the beauty of doctoral work is that it is capacious, it contains multitudes, there is not a single story to be told or line of analysis, inquiry or theoretical framing to take. In that respect, I think that one can lean into that sense of uncertainty, it’s important to retain an openness, to allow yourself to be challenged by and responsive to all that the experience of fieldwork brings.
Michele Friedner on her book, Sensory Futures

March 27th, 2023

Interview by Timothy Y. Loh

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/sensory-futures

Tim Loh: Congratulations on this exciting new book! Your first book, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India (2015), examined the productivity and limits of deaf similitude—what you and your interlocutors called DEAF-SAME— and forms of deaf becoming as deaf people turned towards each other. Is it accurate to say that this book looks at how the state, pharmaceutical companies, and medical practitioners also strive to make deaf people the same, albeit in a different way? Can you tell us also how you moved from that earlier project to this one?

Michele Friedner: Thank you so much for your close reading and generous analysis and the making of connections here. I also look forward to seeing what you do in your cochlear implant research! I think you’re absolutely right that Sensory Futures is about sameness although there’s lots of friction and ambivalence around this sameness. There are putatively star cases and professionals constantly compare children and their mothers and the work that mothers do. The star cases and mothers also evaluate themselves in relation to others. And deaf sociality, or implanted sociality, is both encouraged and discouraged as children are supposed to hang out with hearing children instead of other deaf children. As I write, it often seems like there are biosocial refusals. There’s also constantly the spectre of the bad mother and the failed child. For the state, CI corporation, surgeons, and most/many audiologists and speech and language therapists, the goal is to create a hearing child who is close to, near to, or almost “normal” in terms of listening and spoken language. However, and beyond this, the project is also to create people and state citizens who do not need any help and support from the government and who are “independent.” These people ideally don’t have so-called deaf accents and develop “hearing brains.”

I didn’t plan to write a book about cochlear implants or to conduct research on them. However, when I returned to India in 2016, after my first book was published, I learned about state and central government programs providing deaf and hard of hearing children with cochlear implants and I became intrigued. I was also really interested because signing deaf adults want more signing deaf adults in the world and they want Indian Sign Language (ISL) to be seen as “normal.” The deaf adults I met at one particularly institute in the state of Kerala—where they were enrolled in BA programs in ISL—were really upset because at the same institute there were early intervention programs for small deaf children who had been implanted. These college students were excited about their coursework and their friendship networks, and they wanted to teach these little kids ISL but felt that the kids’ parents literally pulled them away and prevented them from seeing sign language. They were worried about the future of deafness in India. And so I decided to do research on cochlear implants in India. I was fascinated by how the state was now funding these super expensive surgeries and devices. I was also fascinated by the new expectations that seemed to be emerging—that kids born deaf could become normal—and that there was a new sensory infrastructure developing. And it’s also interesting to think about things like newborn hearing screening and attempts to develop universal screenings and what these screenings mean for the kinds of choices parents have (or not). Laura Mauldin writes about this too in a US context. I’ve talked with Mara Mills about how hearing is perhaps the most surveilled sense. What does this mean?

Tim Loh: You write a chapter about maintaining and caring for cochlear implants and the work that parents and implantees have to put in to get the devices to work and to continue to work, and the new dependencies on corporate and medical infrastructures that emerge from getting an implant. You examine the inequitable distribution of cochlear implants around the world (as you also do here) in addition to the limits of “tinkering” and “hacking” that have become central to crip technoscience. What new insights into the relationship between disability and technology do you think your book provides?

Michele Friedner: I think my book pushes us to look at how projects of normalization involving technology use can result in new and complex dependencies on device corporations. The children who do really well with cochlear implants, who learn to listen and speak and become auditorily dependent—are the most precarious and vulnerable. If their devices break, they don’t have other ways to communicate. I also think we need to pay attention to ambivalent users, sometimes users, and non-users, and the ways that individuals and families are essentially abandoned by device manufacturers. Because cochlear implants work so well for some people, it’s imperative that there are more safeguards and supports in place for maintenance. It’s an issue of sensory and social justice.

Tim Loh: One of the important concepts that you advance in this book is that of “multiple normals,” which you have also discussed elsewhere. Normality is a desired outcome for some of your interlocutors but it is also a kind of narrowing that contrains different ways of being in the world, and you argue against prescribing teleological paths for deaf people. I found especially thought-provoking your critique not only of sensory normality as advanced by cochlear implant advocates but also of the project of “becoming-disabled or becoming-deaf in terms of identity and community formation” (p. 161) as advanced by some disability and deaf advocates and scholars, which can also be teleological. Can you tell us more about what you think the stakes of this idea are?

Michele Friedner: I think that often within disability and deaf communities, there is a celebratory narrative around coming to a disabled or deaf identity that involves embracing this (new) identity and finding community and sociality. I think this narrative is just as teleological as the narrative around becoming hearing or becoming normal. I think that we need multiple ways of being disabled, deaf, and normal in the world and that we also need more robust analytic language for discussing different experiences—relating to the senses, perception, and pain, as examples. I think the move in disability studies towards crip theory really helps us to destabilize disability identity and I am not quite sure that we’ve seen a similar move in deaf studies/deaf anthropology.

Tim Loh: I was also struck by your emphasis on “total communication” as an approach, both as articulated by anthropologist Margaret Mead as well as a pedagogical method for deaf children that saw its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s but seems to have mostly fallen out of favor in many deaf educational circles. As you write in the conclusion, “Surely there are more than four ways (listening and spoken language, a bilingual-bicultural approach using sign language, cued speech, and total communication) to communicate. I see value in total communication as a philosophy that involves all of the senses and orienting to children and others more generally based on what they need and when they need it” (p. 193). Do you see this work as in some ways a reclaiming of that term?

Michele Friedner: I really love this term and what it meant for Mead—as an orientation towards openness and recognizing all signals, or at least more signals, as communicative. I also recognize that many in deaf and disabled communities have major beef with how total communication is used as a practice. In deaf schools, for example, total communication has come to mean “sim-comming” or simultaneous communication in ASL and English, which does not provide deaf children with access to a full and complete language and basically is just half and half. And in autistic education, total communication approaches have been used as an excuse not to teach autistic children language at all. While I am aware of these grave problems, I also think as a philosophy or way of orienting to other people, especially those who do not communicate the same as you do, total communication is very compelling. There has been so much exciting work lately in deaf studies on translanguaging and semiotic ideologies and on “crip linguistics,” which resonates with how I think about total communication.

Tim Loh: As with your first book, your positionality as a deaf person shaped many of the interactions you had with your interlocutors. I loved hearing about your experiences and seeing how they framed your analysis: your deaf interlocutors’ reactions when you decided to get a second implant, your interactions with your surgeon as well as with AVT (Auditory Verbal Therapy) specialists (those Ss!), and, of course, the interview you conducted with your mother. Can you say a little more about your approach to writing this very academic—yet deeply personal—book?

Michele Friedner: I struggled with how to include myself, my choices, and my family’s choices. I also struggled with writing about them in a way that does not seem banal or sentimental. And I don’t want to be one of those deaf people writing about deafness for a hearing audience; I want what I write to be interesting to deaf folks as well. I felt like I had to include myself in the book because as I noted, I chose to get implanted after doing my dissertation research with Indian Sign Language speakers and then I chose to get a second implant during the midst of this fieldwork because my hearing aid broke and my health insurance would not pay for a replacement, but it would pay for an implant! And during the research, people—surgeons, audiologists, families, children—all had questions for me about my experience with cochlear implants. And, as I discuss in the book, my speech was also adjudicated by speech and language therapists and found to be deficient.

Tim Loh: What are your hopes for Sensory Futures? Who do you hope will read it, and what work do you hope that it will do in the world?

Michele Friedner: I’d love for everyone, including my mother, surgeons, audiologists, and speech and language therapists to read it. I was excited that there were funds to make the book open access and that folks in India have been reading it. I received a very nice email from an audiologist and speech and language therapist in India who told me that while she did not agree with everything I had written, she appreciated the book. She also encouraged other practitioners to read it. I want medical anthropologists, sensory anthropologists, and deaf studies and disability studies scholars to read it—I think it’s super important to think about the ways that sense is produced, and constrained, through political economic conditions. It’s not just that the senses are culturally produced, but with the advent of new technology, senses are actually produced. I also hope the book intervenes in discussions of normalizing, normals, and normality and contributes to how we might think of normalization as narrowing or constraining. And methodologically, I hope more people will start explicitly writing about how they do research with others in inter-sensory ways!