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Mark LeVine on his book Heavy Metal Islam

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https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520389380/heavy-metal-islam

Lara Sabra: Your book has shown that especially in the Middle East, which suffers from censorship and authoritarian regimes, art can be and is used as a political weapon/strategy for defiance and even relief from experiences of violence and repression. What can we learn about society or about politics from studying art and music? How can music or art, more generally, function as a resource towards understanding issues that social scientists typically explore?

Mark LeVine: You know that’s kind of interesting because art is one of the first things that humans did, that makes us human. The ability to create symbolic representations of reality or of our imagination and then share them with other humans – that’s probably one of the defining features that separate us from every other species on this planet. So it’s interesting that one of the most basic expressions of our humanity is so rarely used as an arena for investigation or study by political scientists and other social scientists. That’s a problem of political science and the narrowness of their conception of what politics is. It’s not just a problem of art or culture and how they’re excluded from analyses of politics, it’s also a disciplinary problem within the social sciences, this idea that you can separate politics from sociology, or sociology from anthropology. Obviously, there are nuances and every discipline has its own particular focuses, but they also all run into each other and ask different questions about what is quite often the same phenomenon, usually involving power and how humans gather, utilize, maintain, and hold onto power over other human beings. Art is going to be, like you said, a weapon in those struggles. Its also going to be a tool of resilience or healing; art can be medicine. But also, art talks back to power, always.

And usually when people don’t have the power to resist directly, either politically or physically through fighting or some form of mass protest, they can at least resist through art. So art becomes a site of resistance. If art is a site of resistance, then it’s inherently political. Therefore, looking at art and artistic production becomes a way of understanding politics that might not be visible if you’re just looking at the official political realm – the realm of official political contestation and of official political actors like voters, politicians, insurgents, military. Art expands the conversation. Looking at art brings to the surface trends or beliefs that might still be hidden, because bringing them to the surface in that way would expose people to state violence and repression.

And on the other hand, it’s not just about studying the art produced by the oppressed, it’s also about studying the art produced by the oppressor. With Israel/Palestine right now, we can understand even more about the nature of this violence and occupation by looking at the music and artwork created by Israelis and Palestinians since October 7, than we can by looking at official pronouncements to the media. Art is usually way more honest. Even when the art is duplicitous, even when it’s state-sponsored art created to reinforce a clearly nonsense program – it still tells us how the government sees things; or which people the government thinks it needs to speak to in cultural ways and what discourse it thinks it can most usefully deploy to maintain its grip on people.

Lara Sabra: How important was collaboration in the research for and the creation of this book? There are several moments in the book where you describe your participation in various activities with your research participants by playing musical gigs, co-writing and composing songs, and even co-writing or editing chapters of your book. How did this collaboration come about? Was it intentional or spontaneous and organic?

Mark LeVine: There’s a famous quote that I’ve used many times by this great African musician Manu Dibango, who famously said “There is only one race: the race of musicians.” What he was getting at is how musicians from very different cultures can meet each other, and within minutes of meeting each other they can be playing together as brothers or sisters. There is this ability in musicians to create deep relationships very quickly with each other through music. And because I approached many of these artists that I wound up writing about and working with first as a musician, it was much easier for me to work with them and for them to trust me.

I think the traditional mode of doing ethnographic research is extremely extractive and highly imbalanced in terms of power relationships, and very often has no benefit for the people involved. One of the places where this has long been challenged has been in ethnomusicology. The pioneers in doing this have long been musicians who are also anthropologists. If you look at their work – people like Steven Feld or Philip Bohlman – they tend to work collaboratively with the people they’re studying and produce collaborative research that reflects a shared set of values, questions, and assumptions. This is of much more benefit and more respectful to the communities they’re studying than the kind of extractive anthropology that has for so long been dominant, though less now than before.

I’m also very influenced by Indigenous research methodologies and protocols by Indigenous peoples who have always been the biggest victims of this kind of extractive research to begin with. There’s an entire set of Indigenous research principles revolving around collaboration, permission, respect – what I and Prof. Lucia Sorbera of Sydney University call a collaborative ontology. That’s the principle I’ve long worked in. You can’t treat people as merely objects or subjects of your extractive knowledge – the way anthropologists traditionally treated so-called primitive peoples. I always try to begin my relationship with people by asking them, how can I be useful to you? What story can I tell that is helpful and respectful to them and that teaches other people something they don’t know? My philosophy has always been to work with people as musicians first, and then let them tell me what aspects of their lives and their art they think are important to share with other people.

Lara Sabra: While the musical genre the book is focusing on is heavy metal, you make continuous references to musicians who explore other genres throughout the book such as hip-hop, rap, and rock. Indeed, when I think about music in relation to politics, I think of these musical genres first and foremost, especially drawing on my own experience within protest movements in Beirut of the past decade where it was these types of music that was played at protest squares (not heavy metal). Why did you choose to focus on heavy metal specifically?

Mark LeVine: Since I wrote that book, metal has become less popular, a lot of young people have switched over to hip-hop. It’s easier, it’s cheaper to record, it’s more popular in a way. So hip-hop and EDM have kind of supplanted metal. Electro-dabke, Omar Suleiman, all of those people have become big stars by mixing together house, electronic, with Arab(ic) dance music –that’s a huge thing, but it wasn’t yet so prevalent when I was doing research for the book. In that period, from the early 90s to the mid-2000s, metal was the premier form of rebellious youth music. By 2007, hip-hop had taken over as the more popular form of what I call “Extreme Youth Music.”

But metal has more pure emotional power than these other genres; it enables a real catharsis. If a form of art can carry and transmit a lot of power, then it’s also gonna transmit a lot of political power. So naturally, it was a very easy music genre to politicize, even if it’s political in a very subcultural way. When Egyptian or Iranian artists are singing metal songs in English, they are usually saying things that would get them arrested or thrown in jail. Metal was able to transmit political protest, even if it was just within the in-group or subculture. Hip-hop is powerful because of the vocal element, the words, the lyrics, the specificity. Metal is much more about the power of the music and the guttural-ness of the vocals. The words are important too, but less important than the power and the way they are being sung. I created a term called “aeffect” – a combination of affect or effect – to refer to this kind of affective power that has political effect. Metal music is very aeffective – it’s got incredibly affective power, at a pre-political, pre-discursive level, but that also has immediate discursive political implications.

Lara Sabra: I’m fascinated by one of the ideas you seem to be exploring in this book, which is the similarity and subsequent competition between the alternative, youth-driven heavy metal scenes in the Arab world and the religious/political authorities dominating their societies. Can you elaborate or expand on this?

Mark LeVine: Metal as an intense, affective music shares many of the same practices as extreme religious practice, like Sufism, for example. When you see Sufi practices of dance and rhythmic movement to very intense drum beats and you watch people moving, it looks like they’re headbanging. And they are headbanging. It’s the same thing, the way the human body goes into a trance-like, repetitive extreme movement, to rhythms that encourage that. So of course, metal is gonna have a lot in common with that, because it’s an ecstatic form of music. Same thing with a mosh pit in a punk show – it’s the same kind of ritualistic intense movement that produces this emotional psychic state that is very similar to religious states that get produced through extreme practices. That’s why a friend of mine in Pakistan, this famous musician named Salman Ahmad, from the band Junoon, said, “The reason why the mullahs hate us is because we’re their competition.” And he didn’t mean politically – what he means is that they satisfy the same human needs of young people as religion. And that’s why there are attacks on metal and other musicians by conservative religious forces, because they understood they were a threat to them.

Lara Sabra: Much has changed in the political landscapes of most of the countries you write about in this book, and arguably much has gotten worse. What would you say makes this book relevant today? What are the implications of this book now? Is art/music still a legitimate and transformative space of resistance/alterity/creativity in light of the extreme violence we’ve witnessed very recently?

Mark LeVine: What I said in Heavy Metal Islam is that music is like a canary in the coal mines for looking at changes that are going to happen whether or not the elite in these countries want it or not. In some ways, I think it’s fair to say that I’m one of the people who predicted the explosion of youth activism that we saw with the uprisings of 2009 and beyond (really, 2005-06 in Lebanon). Many of the people and the music that I was studying in the early 2000s went on to be very important in the revolutionary moment of 2009-2014. Most of the young activists in the Arab uprisings or Iran were people who came out of the extreme music scene. And this is because – and this is key – the set of skills you need to form an underground DIY song culture are the same set of skills you need to form an underground DIY political or social movement. You need to know how to organize, you need to know how to circulate ideas and cultural production, you need to know how to get people together – all without the authorities knowing. You need to create something that appeals to a lot of the people in your group without being noticed by others. And these are all the things you need to do underground politics. So it wasn’t surprising to me that the people who were running Tahrir Square when I got there on day four of the uprisings were all my metalhead friends. The landscape has changed, and metal is not as important today in the region as it was then. But find what is the metal of today: find what music today plays the role that metal did, and spend time looking at it.

Christina Woolner on her book, Love Songs in Motion

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University of Chicago Press

Amanda Weidman: First of all, thank you for this beautiful, ethnographically and sonically rich work! You’ve brought together ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and voice studies to weave a theoretically rich account of how expressive culture is working in post-conflict Somaliland to rekindle a sense of intimacy and shared experience, and rebuild a public sphere.

To start off, can you describe a moment from your fieldwork that you feel produced an important discovery or realization?

Christina Woolner: Oh that’s a great question. It is hard to pick just one but let me share something from fairly early in my research. About 3 or 4 months into my fieldwork, I was chatting with a friend from Boorame, and explaining a bit about what I’d been up to. By this point this included a somewhat bewildering number of activities, including everything from working in a sound archive to hanging out in artists’ homes, visiting radio and TV studios, listening to music with friends and attending live performances. I told him that I sometimes wished for a more predictable daily schedule, and that it wasn’t always clear how these very diverse types of encounters were connected. His response was simple: “What seems to unite these things, Christina, is love songs.”

In retrospect, this is an incredibly obvious observation – and, given I had ended up in these places because I was attempting to “follow the thing,” to borrow from Appadurai, of course the link between them was love songs. But hearing that comment at that point in my research made me realize that part of love songs’ significance lies precisely in the fact that they are this link: they move across places conceived as public and private all the time, and link people and feelings across both time and space. This realization eventually became a central part of the book’s argument and title: songs are not static, they are always in motion, and their political-affective power is very much tied to this fact. This idea also gives the book its structure: each chapter documents love songs at a different point in this movement, from private to public and back again—from the intimate disclosures and artistic collaborations that birth love songs to their public circulation, from private listening to public performance.

Amanda Weidman: Love, sincerity or “singing from the heart”, intimacy: these are concepts that come up throughout the book. Can you give us a sense of how you walk the fine ethnographic line between appealing to your readers’ intuitive understanding of what these mean, on the one hand, and on the other, emphasizing their culturally and historically specific emergent meanings in 1950s-2010s Somaliland?

Christina Woolner: One of the most productive and challenging features of my research was the fact that many of the central concepts you’ve identified seem to have intuitive appeal to diverse audiences. And indeed, my interlocutors often presumed that I would understand what they meant by things like “love” and “singing from the heart,” in a manner similar to the way that I presume my readers might have a sense of what these ideas invoke. As Weston notes of the concept of intimacy as an analytic: it carries with it a kind of “generative imprecision.” Significantly, love songs themselves are intimately generative in this way—they are powerful precisely because of how they presume the experience of love(-suffering) will be intelligible to others, yet also leave space for listeners to hear their own experiences. So as a writer, at times I have taken a cue from the poets I work with by leaning into this generative imprecision and heeding the saying “dadka u dhaaf iyaga ayaa micnaysan” (“let the people find the meaning themselves”).

But, as you note, these concepts also have a very specific cultural history and significance. I deal with this in two ways. The first is Chapter 1, where I chart the cultural-historical origins of ideas about love and voice as they congeal in love songs. This gives readers a sense of how these concepts are locally conceptualized and explains why I often use the term love(-suffering) rather than simply love. The second is by being transparent about instances when I realized there was a rupture between my interlocutor’s assumptions and my own. This happened regularly when discussing love experiences, as many interlocutors assumed these would involve suffering in a way that I did not; it also happened when discussing “singing from the heart,” because I initially had different ideas about what might make a voice sound sincere. I recount several such moments throughout the book, including in the conclusion, where I try to make sense of why one interlocutor and dear friend, the late singer Khadra Daahir, wished suffering upon me. I ultimately use this as a jumping board to reflect on the challenge you’ve identified, and that I think is at the heart of all ethnography—how to balance respect for the specificity of experience with a desire to say something about the human condition that resonates with diverse audiences. This ultimately brings me full circle to a consideration of how love songs and ethnography might both be about “a desire for a narrative about something shared” (the “generatively imprecise” definition that Berlant suggests for “intimacy”). It will be up to my readers to decide if I’ve been successful.

Amanda Weidman: In constructing your treatment of voice in this ethnography, you introduce the concept of envocalization. Can you explain the relationship of this idea to the concepts of entextualization, decontextualization, recontextualization?  What does the concept of envocalization do for ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists that these other concepts don’t?

Christina Woolner: Several related things. Firstly, I do use it as a kind of shorthand for the trio of concepts you’ve listed, but I use a single term to emphasize that a text is always in the making. Envocalization also obviously draws attention to the fact that these texts are animated by the voice, so the term implicitly highlights that texts that are voiced come into the world and move about in a particular way. So it’s a bit of an attempt to rescue these very helpful concepts from a notion of text that has become so expansive in its metaphorical applications that it’s lost some of its analytical precision. But given that I treat the voice as both a sonic and social phenomenon, I also use this term to show how the way people use their voices (what I refer to as practices of voicing), and the ideas people have about what the voice is and does (what you’ve helpfully termed ideologies of voice), are mutually reinforcing. So what this term offers is a framework for understanding how voiced texts—songs, oral poems, or otherwise—move about and do things in a manner very much enabled by their sonic form, in an ongoing process in which the voice as a sonic and social object is constantly reconstituted.

Amanda Weidman: Additionally, in relation to your theorization of voice, you use the concept of multivocality and draw a helpful contrast between ideologies of voice and practices of voicing. What role do these concepts play in the understanding of voice that you are building in this book?

Christina Woolner: Following on from my previous answer, I try to show how the power of the voice resides in the interplay of specific ideologies of voice and actual practices of voicing. I do this because, in the case of love songs, I found that vocal ideologies and practices intersected in ways I initially found counter-intuitive but were key to what was going on. To be more specific: I was often told that the voice should “sound from the heart.” The affective purchase of songs thus rests on an ideology that figures the voice as the natural and sincere expression of an individuals’ deeply felt internal sentiments. But if you look at the actual practices of voicing by which songs are animated, they emerge as multivocal at every turn: in the way they are collaboratively composed, in the way they are performed, and in the way that people talk about, listen to, and re-voice songs. What I attempt to show is that this multivocality doesn’t undermine people’s expectation that songs “sound from the heart”: in fact, it helps to constitute and reinforce it as songs are continually envocalized.

You include a chapter about your experience of learning to play the oud.  Why was this an important part of your fieldwork? Can you say more about the role of this instrument and the relationship between instrument and voice in this context? Does the oud have a voice?

Christina Woolner: Perhaps naively, I didn’t originally conceive of my oud lessons as a major part of my research. But I quickly realized that I was learning a lot more than how to play a few tunes. To start, my lessons gave me a front-row seat to the incredible determination and the socio-political sensibilities that it takes to be a musician in Somaliland. My teacher, Cabdinaasir Macallin Caydiid, had been an active member of the Somali National Movement—as an exiled musician, then an armed combatant—and he’d played a key role in rebuilding the arts sphere after the war. He was celebrated as a musician and a veteran, but he also lived an incredibly difficult life, not only because it’s hard to earn a living as a musician, but also because musicians still occupy an ambiguous social-political-religious space. Cabdinaasir recently passed away, and I feel especially grateful for the time we had together.

It was also in my lessons that I started to appreciate more fully the sounded dynamics of love songs, and the importance of their instrumentation to their affective force. The oud has been critical here since the beginning—it was the fabled clandestine arrival of an oud in Somaliland in the 1940s, brought by Cabdullaahi Qarshe, that is credited with birthing qaraami, the earliest form of love song. Then, as now, the oud’s cod—which means both “voice” and “sound” in Somali—is critical to how songs convey emotion, and many listeners described to me the relief that the sound of the oud brings. The oud does this by introducing the melodic motif, adding heterophonic texture, and dialoguing with the singer. Good oud players are also adept at adding xawaash (spice), or embellishments, that are especially important for conveying feeling and a sense of spontaneity. So I suggest that the oud’s voice, and the process by which musicians acquire the ability to sound love, is critical to love songs’ intimate multivocality.

Amanda Weidman: Again, congratulations on this terrific and inspiring work and thank you for doing this interview! Now that the book is out, what are your next steps?

Christina Woolner: Thanks, I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to think back through the work with these questions. As for next steps, I’m currently wrapping up a project about the more overtly politically dynamics of giving voice in Somaliland: my focus here has been a 2017 poetry chain, in which dozens of poets debated issues related to government corruption and accountability in a series of poems that circulated on Facebook. Following this, I’m hoping to start a project that looks more explicitly at the role of music and poetry in Somaliland’s peacebuilding process in the 1990s. Several musicians I worked with were involved in this and there are anecdotal reports of the important role played by women poets, but it’s not really been documented. So I’m hoping to help document this, and to more explicitly explore how sound as a medium is imbricated in the quest for reconciliatory politics.

Jonathan A. Gómez takes the page 99 test

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From my first steps towards considering how Black Americans hear and represent themselves in musical sound, I have wanted to address the question of how Black musicians can effectively organize around the idea of shared musical histories and practices without straying into essentialist discourses. My goal has been to work towards understanding how sounds recognizable as Black emerge, develop, and transform over time, simultaneously offering a challenge to Blackness(es) as purely biological rather than cultural. Page 99 of my dissertation, “The Way We Play: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical identity,” is a critical point at which I make an intervention into anti-essentialist discourses. Roughly a quarter of the way through my second chapter, a case study of vocalist Alberta Hunter (1895-1984), in a sub-section titled “the qualia of Black voice,” I argue:

While Hunter foregrounds race-based suffering as a component for “authentic” blues performance, her earlier claim that Black performers possess little “tricks” of performance that others frequently overlook, situates blues performance in practice rather than biology. The instability of these tricks from performance to performance, modified intentionally (as Hunter did to avoid a stable model for [vocalist Sophie] Tucker’s mimicry) or not, further marks an underlying improvisatory aesthetic which makes a singular set of performance characteristics difficult, or impossible, to grasp. I further argue that Hunter’s understanding does not reflect a biological notion of race but rather one socio-politically and culturally rooted in the particular experience of Black Americans within the racial hierarchies of U.S. society. (page 99)

The culturally-rooted practices to which I refer function semiotically as indexes of Blackness for those who hear them, commenting metapragmatically (cf. Silverstein 1993) on Black musical history through the act of performance. I reframe these practices as “musical qualia of Blackness,” sonic embodiments or manifestations of the quality Blackness, shared and transformed between and amongst Black American musicians across time and space.

Page 99 is a point of transition in my argument made via Black feminist scholar bell hooks’s thinking on “strategic essentialism” in her oft-cited Teaching to Transgress (1994). She argues that adopting an essentialist position may function as “a strategic response to domination and to colonization,” (hooks 1994, 83), offering an important lesson for the study of music. For Black musicians whose histories and culture are so frequently stolen, appropriated, or “silenced” (Trouillot 1995), music has been a critical site for the development, maintenance, and transmission of this historical and cultural knowledge. Such processes of knowledge production and sharing are accomplished via a kind of musical interdiscursivity (cf. Silverstein 2005), connecting Black musicians in the present to performances and performers from Black musical history. In that way, I pose a challenge to anti-essentialist considerations of Black music, by augmenting hooks’s argument, insisting that Black musical identities are historically-grounded and carefully “curated,” to borrow form Daphne Brooks (2021), within Black communities. Page 99 is a useful window into the thought process behind my desire to understand to offer an alternative to essentialist understandings of Blackness, taking seriously the histories, experiences, and choices made by Black musicians across time and space.

Jonathan A. Gómez. 2022. “The Way We Play”: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical Identity. Harvard University, PhD diss.

Yana Stainova on her book, Sonorous Worlds: Musical Enchantment in Venezuela

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Interview by Ahona Palchoudhuri

https://www.press.umich.edu/11698102/sonorous_worlds

Ahona Palchoudhuri: I’d like to begin with a particularly moving ethnographic instance from your book in which Demian – who I sometimes like to think of as the protagonist of Sonorous Worlds – shares with you the news of his grandfather’s passing and of how listening to Mozart’s Requiem allowed him to come to terms with his loss, and first shed a tear. During the course of your book, you explore through Demian what you call the “Life Behind the Music.” This isn’t life only in the sense of personal history – but instead, a musical vitality that comes alive in the experiences of wonder and enchantment that the embodied reception of music enables. What is the relation between music and life that Sonorous Worlds poses?

Yana Stainova: What a wonderful question, Ahona, thank you. The way you pose it makes me think about the work of Veena Das and Stanley Cavell and I wish I could go back and expand on the concept in the book! The way that I summon the term life in the book is multifaceted. On the one hand, it describes how the specific life experiences and flights of the imagination of each of the musicians imbues a piece of music with unique meaning. This allows me to disentangle the practice of classical music in Venezuela from a narrow definition of a colonial imposition that turns players into automatons. But, as you point out, the way I think about the life behind the music goes beyond a person’s biography. I was inspired by the post-humanist philosophical tradition to which enchantment belongs that made me pay attention to the vitality of matter beyond the human which makes sound possible. As a purely physical phenomenon, a musical instrument sounds because it vibrates. The material it is made of — wood, brass, silver — begins to vibrate in response to the breath or touch of the player, setting the air around it to vibrate as well. These philosophical intuitions were elaborated on by my interlocutors, who frequently referred to their instruments as being alive, jokingly calling them a girlfriend, a best friend. They also referred to music itself as being alive, as having a life of its own. These reflections led me to think about music and life as born out of a complex and dynamic relationship between the player, the instrument, and the musical piece itself. Life, then, is about socialites and forms of communication that extend beyond the human and beyond language itself. 

Ahona Palchoudhuri: Enchantment emerges in the book as the modality in which you experience your fieldsite most intensely. But you also ask us what it might mean to deploy enchantment as a feature of one’s research design. What form of ethnographic method did enchantment offer you?

Yana Stainova: As I observed my interlocutors experience enchantment, defined as a state of being fascinated by an activity one loves, I allowed myself to experience enchantment together with them: through playing music, being touched by their music, and believing in their dreams. It was very important for me to distinguish experiences of enchantment from a momentary fascination that can subsequently be tamed, rationalized, and neatly explained. I wanted to carry this experience in the field with me as a method, theory, and modality of writing. With this, I also aimed to blur the boundaries between these activities, to acknowledge them as essentially part of one another. I have observed that much scholarship studying people in precarious situations tends to portray their lives almost entirely in the vocabulary of these larger forces they are battered by, be it as symptoms of or resistance to structural violence. What I observed through a focus on musical practices were realms of aesthetic experience and the imagination that were in excess of the structural forces that gripped the lives of residents on the urban margins. Being enchanted, for them, was a conscious choice, a desire to find respite from the violence of everyday life. Enchantment for me emerged as a philosophical orientation, one that privileges the more fragile forces of dreams, hopes, and leaps of the imagination nascent at the backdrop of structural violence.

Ahona Palchoudhuri: There’s a set of liberties that one can take or assumptions one can make about the people one has practiced music with over the years– in the sense that you have shared habits of thought, a joint grasp over mood, and know how to fill in for one another and act on each other’s behalf. One might think of this as a musical kinship of sorts. How do social and musical relationships intersect? Are there social relationships that are essentially musical? 

Yana Stainova: What distinguishes music practice within El Sistema from other classical music traditions in the West is that it is almost entirely collective. From an early age, the students take classes together with their peers, and the more experienced students teach those who are just starting. I think about the bonds and communities established in teaching through the concept of the gift. Demian, the book’s protagonist as you call him, described teaching music as “a gift of the soul, a gift that stays with this person.” Rather than a reciprocity that returns the gift to the original receiver, the teacher, I describe teaching as an impulse that propagates the sonorous gift outwards, to other students. A similar phenomenon takes place at the level of orchestral practice. El Sistema orchestras, especially the most advanced ones, rehearsed and performed as a collective almost every day over many years. The collaboration, listening, and interdependence between members of an orchestra is essential for bringing a piece of orchestral music into being. This was most clearly illustrated to me during a concert where one of the instruments did not sound due to a technical problem. This disturbed the delicate balance in an orchestra and elicited other instruments to make up for the silence. In moments when the interdependence was at its best, it led to very moving performances that left the performers in tears and evoked standing ovations from the audiences. Both the highs and lows of musical collaboration led to deep bonding and camaraderie between the musicians but also, predictably, to tensions and irritation. The latter were frequently symptoms of the hierarchical setup of an orchestra. What I found striking about these musical communities is that they encompassed musicians from different socio-economic classes and even political convictions in a deeply polarized country. Musical collaboration allowed for a community to emerge where previously there was none, where one was not possible. The artistic and aesthetic collaboration at least for a moment made differences between musicians less important.

Ahona Palchoudhuri: One might understand Sonorous Worlds as a study of where it is that one might locate the political potential of music, if not necessarily within its demonstrative engagement with dominant political forces. You show us how the aesthetic labor underlying the practice of music elicits, on its own terms, a capacity to aspire and a fight to thrive. In doing so, I think you ask a really difficult question of how it is that music affords, and even nurtures, a spectrum of political positions –some of which might even seem apolitical. How would you describe the relation between this political energy of music and the Venezuelan state, as you experienced it during your fieldwork. In what ways did these energies also remain outside the reach of the state?

Yana Stainova: Many of the musicians I spoke to at El Sistema stayed away from discussions of formal politics. They tried to convince me that music is apolitical. Of course, as an anthropologist, I found this to be impossible to get on board with. However, these conversations led me to locate the political potential of music elsewhere, spilling beyond the realm of formal politics. For example, I was able to appreciate that, as mentioned above, collective musical practices allowed people to forget, for a moment, the deeply fragmenting impact of political divisions in Venezuela and build communities beyond political divisions. I also came to see more clearly that nestled in the daily labor of classical music practices were dreams for the future that went beyond what was dictated as possible by the socioeconomic constraints these young people grew up in — poverty, everyday violence, and state repression. The labor of learning to play a musical instrument was the labor of conjuring dreams deemed impossible and slowly working towards them. The labor required of me as an anthropologist was to witness, document, and learn to believe in those dreams. Each of the musicians’ unique dreams and imaginative horizons all coexisted within a piece of music, making it impossible for the state and the institution to impose a single unified meaning on it. These “dancing energies” generated in collective music practice were unruly and spilled beyond – in excess of – imposed meanings and political categories. 

Ahona Palchoudhuri: Demian asks at some point: “I wonder what you are like when you are not an anthropologist?” What particular insights, genealogies and genealogies does anthropology lend to the study of music? 

Yana Stainova: The way you phrase that question casts it in a light I hadn’t thought of before! Previously, I had considered it in terms of whether it’s possible to switch off being an anthropologist. You are asking me to think about what the substance of being an anthropologist is for me. What anthropology has given me is a set of sensibilities that would be impossible to list now. Foremost amongst them is intellectual curiosity, a desire to remain open to different points of view and, importantly, to having my mind changed by people and ideas I encounter in the field. For example, I was born in Bulgaria on the eve of the revolutions that brought about the fall of communism. I was raised with stories about how communism violated people’s freedoms. I arrived in Venezuela with skepticism about socialist ideas. What I have learned from anthropology is to linger with, rather than attempt to resolve, differences of opinion and orientation. When I encountered interlocutors who staunchly believed in the Venezuelan socialist government, even when it was slipping into violence, I tried to remain open as to why they continued to be so committed to this idea and to try to understand how political and historical circumstances shaped people’s opinions. To exist with these differences, I relied on what we had in common: a love of music and prioritizing education. From anthropologists I admire, I have also learned about allowing oneself to be vulnerable and exploring the types of empathy and connection with others that can emerge from that state. Finally, I have been deeply influenced by anthropologists, like João Biehl, Kirin Narayan, Sienna Craig, Carole McGranahan, Katie Stewart, who are also creative writers and poets and whose attention to the beauty of language marks their scholarship. This freedom to bend genre and write in ways that are evocative of aesthetics and emotion has proved essential in thinking and writing about music, an art form that is itself “beyond words.”

Ahona Palchoudhuri: What is your next project about?

Yana Stainova: My next project is about joy. I explore this topic through fieldwork with Latinx women and queer communities of artists in East Los Angeles, some of whom are undocumented. The focus on joy emerged organically from my fieldwork. People I encountered in the field spoke of their capacity to thrive and experience joy despite — and even in response to — the injury and violence to which they are subjected in everyday life. What is particular about the joy they articulate is that it is almost always experienced and generated in community. This differs from the individualistic and neoliberal conceptions of joy that have become entrenched in contemporary culture. I study how these communal conceptions of joy and the spaces that nurture them manage to exist within and in tension with neoliberal forces. 

Falina Enriquez discusses her new book, The Costs of the Gig Economy

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Interview by Owen Kohl

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p086687

Owen Kohl: Let’s start with the powerful title. Can you briefly describe the gig economy in question?

And if I could add a couple of related follow-ups: How does entrepreneurial and precarious project-based work exact costs on contemporary Brazilian artists and musicians? Are there insights that you gained in this distinct context that illuminated what you’ve seen elsewhere in related neoliberal gig economies, e.g., among adjunct professors?

Falina Enriquez: Thank you for these questions and for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to have my book included on the CaMP blog. The title is a great place to start.  The gig economy is, in some ways, particular to Recife and Brazil but in other ways, it’s relatable to those of us who are increasingly part of—or familiar with—the informal and/or temporary employment, lack of benefits, and emphasis on entrepreneurship that gig economy labor entails.

What’s particular about the gig economy in my case study is how strongly it was influenced by multiculturalism in the 2000s both in Pernambuco and in Brazil, more generally. Multiculturalism became part of federal and state-level efforts to democratize political participation, bureaucracy, cultural production, education, and other domains while also becoming part of how Brazil was branding itself domestically and to global audiences.

In Pernambuco, Recife’s municipal government began to brand the city as a multicultural place in the early 2000s and the state government strengthened these efforts, especially after 2007. The comparison of musical practices and sponsorship that I undertake in the book, however, reveals that this push for multiculturalism didn’t really democratize as much as it was supposed to. Instead, it intensified neoliberal economic policies and ideologies. The state government created a new grant-based system of sponsorship [called an edital] for artists and musicians to apply for funding. In the past, if you wanted to perform at Carnival, for example, you had to appeal to a bureaucrat or politician who had clout at a state institution in order for them to appoint or recommend you. But with multiculturalism and the bureaucratization that followed, the system ostensibly became more democratic because anyone could apply regardless of their connections to powerful people. This was more inclusive than before, and it brought more people into the scope of state sponsorship.

At the same time, musicians now had to comply with more demanding standards. They had to be more professional and entrepreneurial in order to stand out among hundreds of other applicants and to show that they could contribute to what was becoming a multicultural economy in Recife and Pernambuco. This economy boosted opportunities for musicians because there were more events where they could perform and more sponsorship [funds] to go around. But in order to take advantage of these opportunities, they had to change their modus operandi.

Musicians accustomed to getting gigs based on word of mouth and peer connections now also had to consider things like: “How am I going to write an application that describes my band in a way that will appeal to state sponsorship committees?” This alone is a demanding task. Most of the musicians I know in Recife don’t generally train to write grants while they also learn to master their instruments. Grants are also a very specialized genre that can be challenging even for people who are highly educated on formal university pathways. Many of my middle-class interlocutors don’t have university degrees and that’s even rarer among my working-class interlocutors, especially those who are elderly.

In summary, then, for musicians in Recife the emergence of the gig economy encompassed a combination of new opportunities and limitations. I think that this is also comprehensible on a broader scale. Neoliberal policies and ideologies related to entrepreneurship present some affordances and flexibility, but as other anthropologists like Ilana Gershon have also discussed, these conditions create tensions and paradoxes that affect ideas of selfhood and other more practical conditions. For example, flexibility in the sense that you aren’t permanently beholden to one company can mean more autonomy, but it also requires laborers to acquire more skills and broaden their networks in order to attract clients and make more money. Not everyone has uniform access to the kinds of resources—both financial and social—to accomplish this.

Similarly, and this is likely something fellow academics can relate to, the popularization and intensification of the gig economy and its related ideologies means that it’s harder to separate leisure time and work time. We have technologies like Zoom that enable us to work from various locations and at various times, but this also means that we are expected to be constantly productive. Among my interlocutors, this has surfaced in the increasing importance of establishing a social media presence across platforms in order to maintain and expand one’s audience. This also requires learning new skills and often, relying on other kinds of professionals like promoters to help. The book sheds light on how being a musical entrepreneur in Recife—as for other entrepreneurs around the world—means having to constantly maintain one’s productivity and expand one’s sphere of influence, so to speak.

This comes with costs like a lack of work/life balance, the production and reproduction of overlapping social inequalities, and a sense of anxiety that comes with financial insecurity, professional instability, precarity, and the need to be in survival mode. These conditions were already present in Recife in 2010 but they have become even more relevant for local musicians since 2015 due to Brazil’s recent and political crises, which have expanded neoliberal policies and ideologies.

Owen Kohl: Musical cosmopolitanism is another valuable theme that you develop. How did you see cosmopolitanism at play in the symbolic connections that artists were making across styles, continents, and eras of Brazilian history?

Falina Enriquez: Cosmopolitanism has been addressed by many scholars, but what I liked about the concept is that it fit how my interlocutors were talking about their music. They understood themselves as bridging gaps between places and people via their music.

So, for example, one of the bands that I worked with, A Roda, thought of themselves and explicitly marketed themselves as “genuinely Pernambucan.” And in many cases, they weren’t just focusing on their connection to Pernambuco, but to the historic neighborhood of Olinda, which is a city within Recife’s metropolitan area. And they pointed out how their music was informed by—and spoke to—that locality. So, they situated themselves in an extremely specific, local way. At the same time, they would describe themselves as being “the same” as Afrobeat band-influenced bands in Brooklyn like Antibalas and the Menahan Street Band that they were aware of, but none of them had ever been to Brooklyn, none of them knew these bands personally. When I would ask them to compare what bands they were most like, they wouldn’t mention their peers in Recife, in Pernambuco, or even in Brazil, which had similar sounds. Instead, they were citing these Brooklyn bands. I see the kinds of stances [that A Roda’s members took] as important aspects of their rooted cosmopolitanism. Just because they saw themselves or heard themselves as being similar to Afrobeat bands in Brooklyn, by no means did they abandon their localness. In fact, these two localities–and their aesthetic dimensions–were in perfect synchrony for them.

As a metaphor, rooted cosmopolitanism reflects how these musicians feel connected or rooted to a specific place and sensibility while also creating material and symbolic branches that link disparate and distant places and sounds. None of this means that they’re also surpassing or transcending the kinds of power dynamics that influence their lives, however. And contrary to other scholars that sometimes celebrate cosmopolitanism as a set of practices that let people transcend boundaries and identities, in this case, I’m using rooted cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanism, more generally, to try to pinpoint the power relations that enable my interlocutors’ practices.

These power relations—and how they relate to the costs of the gig economy–are audible when you compare bands across genres and demographics. In drawing on Afrobeat music and adopting entrepreneurial practices, middle-class bands like A Roda don’t lose prestige, they gain it.

But working-class groups that play traditional music can’t do that, they can’t experiment to the same degree. They also often lack the resources to uphold the increasingly high standards of professionalism that entrepreneurial ideologies are making normative. They’re held responsible by state agencies who often are the only source of funding they have, by middle class listeners, and by other kinds of people in power to uphold tradition, and to therefore limit their experimentation while nonetheless being pushed to become more entrepreneurial. Yet, traditional groups like Maracatu Nação Cambinda Estrela, are nevertheless creating their own rooted cosmopolitanism. They perform maracatu, which has been part of Recife’s sonic landscape since at least the 19th century and are therefore part of a very localized phenomenon. At the same time, this group poetically and politically invokes pan-Africanist ideologies and Latin American forms of leftist activism, thereby recontextualizing maracatu to claim a sense of belonging to much broader regional and global movements.

Owen Kohl: Turning to a subdisciplinary interest: How does attention to issues of scale illuminate contemporary music practices and politics in Brazil?

Falina Enriquez: I drew from linguistic anthropological approaches to scale, scale-making, or scaling as they also call it, because they helped me interpret what my interlocutors are, in part, achieving through their rooted cosmopolitan practices. Scaling is a way to describe how my interlocutors are creating senses of belonging and socio-aesthetic hierarchies through their musical and metamusical practices. They make sonic connections to places, people, and time periods, and in the process imagine their world and their place(s) within it. Scale, in this sense, is both quantitative and qualitative, it is not solely spatial.

Like rooted cosmopolitanism, in the book, scale serves as both a theory and a metaphor that I use to compare different actors across the music scenes that I examine. My interlocutors, for example, musically–and otherwise–express their relationships to other kinds of past and present music from Brazil and elsewhere. And sometimes that scaling happens in qualitative terms. Musicians compare themselves—and others compare them—to other musicians and musical movements. When band members make comments that their music is better, worse, or similar to other bands, they are creating evaluative scales. This is also what’s happening when they’re claiming that their music is more or less locally rooted than other genres or styles. Such processes influence—and are influenced by–the structures of power in which they’re embedded and their access to material things like state sponsorship. So, for example, in an application for state funding if a band can show via their music, their written narratives, and other textual materials that they are as good or better than existing high-prestige bands, then they’re more likely to get sponsorship. Their ability to show this, however, is often dependent on their level of education and familiarity with the genre of grant applications, or their social and financial ability to acquire help from promoters and managers that can help them with these applications.

I employ scale and scaling in other ways throughout the book too. I draw from Arlene Dávila’s idea of upscaling [from Culture Works (2012)] to analyze how governmental and commercial actors were trying to use multiculturalism to make Recife more upscale. They wanted to make the city seem more prestigious, more cosmopolitan, and more appealing to outsiders, especially tourists from southeastern Brazil and the Global North. This kind of upscaling describes neoliberal development projects, but I also combine it with a linguistic anthropological sensibility to show how these economic developments are semiotically communicated and constructed. Governmental discourses about multiculturalism and the staging of specific kinds of musical genres at multicultural, spectacular events like Carnival make Recife into a more upscale place because they reveal its actual and potential value as a commodity. This upscaling relates to my argument that musical entrepreneurship and its intensification in Recife and Pernambuco are evidence of the kinds of encroachments, as some scholars call it, or economizations, as Wendy Brown calls it, which exacerbate the influence of market logics on all parts of our lives.

Owen Kohl: One powerful aspect of the book is your treatment of race and class as entangled aspects of musical performance. Obviously your focus is on neoliberalizing Brazil, but I think your semiotic analysis is applicable far beyond. This comes through in rich ethnographic descriptions, for example, of when government sponsors are reviewing musicians for Carnival.

Could you explain to your audience how you think about how best to capture the unfolding interconnections of race, class, and music in contemporary Brazil?

Falina Enriquez: Yeah, that’s a really complex question because it touches on all of Brazil’s history, essentially. But in terms of the book, what I wanted to reflect was the instability and mobility of race, class, and music in the kinds of unfolding events that I was experiencing. Yes, race, class, and music are definitely entangled. But that entanglement and the kinds of mobility to which I’m referring doesn’t mean that it’s a free-for-all because there are moments when the regimentation of race, class, and music becomes really clear. This issue, I believe, is relevant to many of us who are interested in teasing out the tense and contingent relations between structures of power and how they are artistically and otherwise expressed.

So, for example, the band, A Roda, draws on Afrobeat. They also cite R&B from the US and gesture towards classic Brazilian genres like bossa nova and samba, for example. They incorporate other sounds too, including drumming styles that are associated with the religious practice of Xangô [a.k.a. Candomblé]. In other words, the band plays with–and indexes–Blackness in many ways. And yet, as a whole, and mostly as individuals, the members of A Roda do not identify as Black. Nevertheless, they’re still able to play with racially marked musical elements and gain sponsorship and some prestige because they do it in a way that satisfies middle class norms and expectations.  When a middle-class band like A Roda applies for a grant from the state, they are going to be judged [by the committee evaluating them] very differently than a band that’s taking on a much more explicitly politicized Black sound like reggae, for example.

Meanwhile other bands who applied for state sponsorship and were usually ranked very low or were even disqualified by the evaluating committee often had a much more racialized, working-class kind of self-presentation. For example, some of these bands adopted visible stylistic features of U.S. hip hop, like sunglasses and baseball caps, and sounds drawing from racialized Caribbean styles, like merengue, which prompted [state sponsorship] committee members to hear that band’s music as unfit for state sponsorship. The racialization of such bands was implicitly compounded if most of their members were relatively dark-skinned. In theory, therefore, one can play with musical elements endlessly, but these elements get stabilized and standardized in relation to race and class by powerful actors. The specific interests and sensibilities of middle-class bureaucrats lead them to evaluate musicians in explicit racial and/or class-based terms. These are revealed in judgments they made during discussions about who and what sounds will be best to feature at Carnival and why.

Sandra Kurfürst on her book, Dancing Youth

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Interview by Jonathan DeVore

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/dancing-youth/9783837656343

Jonathan DeVore: Congratulations on your new book! First of all, can you recount how you became involved in the research for the book?

Sandra Kurfürst: Thank you, Jonathan! From 2007 to 2008, I conducted one year of ethnographic research in Hanoi for my PhD thesis. At the time, I was working on public spaces in Hanoi, and regularly hung out around the Lenin Monument at Dien Bien Phu Street and Ly Thai To Garden on the banks of Hoan Kiem Lake. At the time, I met a number of young people there who regularly assembled in the late afternoon hours to perform break moves, hip-hop dance, and popping. I began conducting interviews with young b-boys from the FIT and MiNi Shock Crews and young women dancers from Big Toe Crew. I was especially fascinated by these young women, their movement repertoire, and their fashion style. Whenever they arrived at the pavilion in Ly Thai To Garden, they would change out of their school uniforms – which were white blouses and blue trousers combined with a red scarf – and switch these for belly tops, XXL T-Shirts, and shorts or joggers. Having followed hip hop culture in Vietnam for a decade, I found hip hop’s diverse dance styles an ideal topic to study, as it combines my personal passion for hip hop with my longstanding interests in the anthropology of the urban and questions of socioeconomic transformation.

Jonathan DeVore: This continuity between your research projects nicely illustrates the observation that the questions we begin with in ethnographic research are rarely the same as the questions that we arrive at in the process. Can you describe how the questions and interests that your book addresses arose, and how these may have been transformed during the course of you research? Were there any key moments in your research that affected or even shifted your focus?

Sandra Kurfürst: Hip Hop comprises four practices of MCing (rap), breaking, graffiti writing, and DJing. Initially, I planned on examining all four practices and the interrelations among actors involves in these practices. However, once I began my research into rap and dancing, I soon noticed that there are some overlaps in the communities, but that rather distinct communities of practice have evolved around each practice. Some actors in Vietnam are very active in bringing these different strands of hip hop culture together, but, so far, there are only a few events that unite these different communities of practice. Then again, I found that the community of hip hop dancing was much more diverse than I had expected. The first dancers I talked to all differentiated between diverse styles, such as breaking, popping, locking, waacking, hip hop, and house dance. That is why I reconsidered my focus and decided to write about dance. From the start, I had been fascinated with how many young women engaged in hip hop’s different dance styles. Therefore, I chose a particular gender focus. However, one eye opening moment was a conversation with a woman locker who told me: “I don’t think it’s about young women, but about people who want to enjoy their life and develop themselves (…).” And that is how I got interested in the question of youth aspirations and visions of the good life under conditions of late socialism.

Jonathan DeVore:  Speaking of late socialism, one dynamic that I found interesting in the book was the gradual transition over a period of years from hip-hop as a relatively informal practice, occurring in common public spaces such as the Lenin Monument, to a set of relationships that became increasingly professionalized, involving market exchanges. Some of the dancers you describe who became more prominent, for example, were able to establish their own schools from which they derived their primary incomes.  Can you tell us more about processes of class formation, differentiation, and distinction among dancers in your research? More broadly, can you relate these processes to Vietnams’ transition toward “market reform, commodification, and consumerism, while officially insisting on socialist ideology and one-party rule” (p. 10)?

Sandra Kurfürst: When I did my research on public space in Hanoi between 2007 and 2008, I also interviewed b-boys and women dancers who were regularly meeting and dancing around Ly Thai To Garden. At that time, the dancers were either still in school or had jobs, and they did not have many economic resources. In 2018, the situation seemed to have slightly changed, as most of the professional dancers participating in my research held university degrees, and had gathered experiences in working in office jobs that were unrelated to dance. Some dancers, however, decided to quit their office jobs to open their own dance studios or to work as freelancers at different dance studios. Others owned their own fashion labels and combined their self-entrepreneurism with teaching dance classes. My study is not representative, of course, but from the conversations and interviews with men and women dancers alike, I gathered that most have urban middle-class backgrounds, and many of them grew up in Hanoi. Moreover, the relevance of consumption as both a status symbol, and marker of belonging to the community of practice, was visible and tangible. Indexes of distinction were comprised of street apparel, such as the German or U. S. sports brands Adidas, Nike, Vans, and so on, as well as other commodities, like photo and video cameras. Mobility was a further asset, as many dancers regularly travelled within Vietnam or the Southeast Asia region, which again requires financial resources and time. At the same time, the proliferation of dance studios in Vietnam’s major cities that offer children’s hip hop dance classes cater to growing demands by urban middle-class parents to provide their children with physical exercise and leisure activities other than gaming.

Jonathan DeVore: I see – so, parents want their children moving around instead of just sitting in front of televisions and computers!  This actually relates to another question I wanted to ask you about:  Embodied movements, gestures, and actions are notoriously difficult to represent textually, in the medium of an article or book. Can you describe the difficulties you faced, and the strategies you used, in representing the different dance forms you investigate—not only in the book, but perhaps also in other media, such as fieldnotes?

Sandra Kurfürst: Thank you. This is a topic that I struggle with to this day. Certainly, audiovisual formats are an option, and I would like to further pursue the question of writing dance in the future. As for fieldnotes: After taking dance classes, I recorded my sensations and experiences as well as student-teacher interactions in voice recordings on my way home. Listening to my own voice recordings later on, I particularly noticed my own shortness of breath after having trained with one dancer, named Mai. Also, the interview situations themselves were certainly sensory events. Whenever I sat down to transcribe interview recordings, or to write my field notes, I started humming and singing songs that my interlocutors had played for me on their phones. And I found myself searching the internet for tracks and videos they had told me about. A really fascinating format, to avoid simplifications involved in just describing what I saw and how I moved, seems to be autoethnographic performance. However, what prevented me from engaging in autoethnographic performance in the book were my English language skills. The use of different literary genres to express movement in written language is really appealing to me, but I would have to do so in my own mother tongue. In my teenage years, I used to write rap lyrics. So, writing in German would be one way for me to go.

Jonathan DeVore: I can certainly appreciate this challenge!  And as I read your book, I also found myself looking up YouTube videos of the songs and music videos you cited!  Perhaps a final question to conclude: Are there any interests or questions that remain open for you after writing the book?

Sandra Kurfürst: I keep wondering if, at one point, I could invite the women hip hop dancers to Germany for a performance in the city of Cologne. I think that would be a great opportunity to bring them together with Cologne-based dancers. Moreover, I would really like to meet them again – but due to the pandemic, I have not returned to Vietnam since 2018. At the time, when I got to know the women dancers, they were all at the end of their 20s – an age when women in Vietnam are usually married and have children. So, one question I did not ask, but which comes up again and again, is: To what extent does leading a dancing life have an impact on women dancers’ decisions to marry and have children?

I was also very glad to find queer dancers at dance battles. However, as battles are quite ephemeral events, and the dancers were not directly related to participants in my research, I did not have a chance to talk to them. But it made me wonder if queer performance, such as the style of waacking, helps to open up spaces for the queer community in Vietnam. The LGBTQIA+ community has become more active and more visible in public space, such as with the annual Viet Pride festival. So, I was wondering if dancing, and waacking in particular, may also be a way for them to create a community as well as to gain more public awareness and acceptance.

Jonathan DeVore: Thanks so much for talking with me, Sandra, and congratulations once again on Dancing Youth.  I’ll look forward to reading your next book on one of these other topics!

Siv Lie on her book, Django Generations

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Django Generations

www.djangogen.com

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo114656860.html

Interview by Lynn M. Hooker

Lynn Hooker: First, beginning with the title, your book uses a variety of terms for your chief musical subjects–most often Manouches, Tsiganes, or Romanies, but also sometimes Sinti, Gitans, and Gypsies. How do these terms and the distinctions between them reflect some of the issues you write about?

Siv Lie: I discuss some of these terms in the “Notes and Terminology” section (pp. ix-x), but there is much more to say. The very existence of all these terms and disagreements about what they “actually” mean says a lot about both how Romanies have dealt with racialization and about how they constitute an extremely diverse array of people. The terms Tsigane, Gitan, and Gypsy are all exonyms imposed by Europeans and have become more or less commonplace synonyms for Romanies. They are used by Romanies and non-Romanies (Gadjé) alike. Whether or not they are considered pejorative depends entirely on their contexts of use, and while some Romanies refuse these terms, many use them unproblematically. I think this evolution of usage has to do both with Romanies reclaiming pejorative labels and with the conventionalization of some of these terms over time. For example, on pp. 13-14 of the book, I describe how legislation targeting nomades was a way for the government to continue to not-so-covertly racialize and disenfranchise Romanies. In 1969, this legislation was revised and nomades were renamed Gens du voyage (“Travelers”). Today, nomades has definitely fallen out of use, but many mobile Romanies in France still proudly refer to themselves as Voyageurs despite any negative connotations.

Even with decades of pan-Romani political movements and some linguistic and cultural consistencies across populations, Romanies do not constitute a unified group. I deliberately use “Romanies” instead of the more common “Roma” because Sinti (to which Manouches are closely related, if not synonymous with) tend to see themselves as quite distinct from Roma and sometimes reject a Roma-centric view of Romanies. For example, just recently I was speaking with a Manouche/Sinti friend who kept using “Sinti” to refer to all Romanies, which I understood as his way to de-center “Roma” from pan-Romani politics. It’s an interesting way to assert an ideal of pan-Romani unity while challenging the terms on which that unity has been conceived in the political sphere.

Lynn Hooker: How does the question of group naming in this case contribute to current discussions in anthropology? In ethnomusicology? How do other issues in your study contribute to current discussions in anthropology? In ethnomusicology?

Siv Lie: The naming processes I describe – as highly context-dependent and semantically malleable – relate directly to my use of “ethnorace” to explain how Romanies are understood, and in turn understand themselves, through situated and shifting lenses of “race” and “ethnicity.” When I first came across ethnorace as coined by David Theo Goldberg, I was energized by how perfectly it captured the tensions I was exploring, but I was also confused as to why it had not been taken up more widely in anthropology or ethnomusicology. I thought I must have been missing something obvious! But the more I’ve used it and developed it in the context of struggles for Manouche political recognition and economic justice, the more I’ve realized its much wider potential to better understand how social difference is made.

Ethnorace also feeds into my development of ambivalent essentialism (which I outline on pp. 6-8). The idea of strategic essentialism always seemed appropriate to the maneuvers I observed among Manouche musicians and their supporters, but it never captured the full scope of the tensions they had to deal with. Ambivalent essentialism gets at how the process of self-essentialization involves quite a bit of uncertainty and unresolvable contradiction. I often observed musicians feel quite comfortable presenting themselves in rather stereotypical ways to certain audiences while downplaying or challenging such representations in other contexts, and/or voicing real dilemmas about how they felt compelled to engage in these representations. I point to ambivalent essentialism throughout the book because it’s an apt way to account for these tensions and for the negotiations that must occur within any ethnoracially-associated music scene. I think that this book can therefore contribute to current discussions about identity politics and cultural commodification in ways that embrace contradiction without trying to resolve it.

This book engages with a range of concepts both well-established and emergent in anthropology (such as raciolinguistics/raciosemiotics, cultural citizenship, cultural expediency, colorblind racism, erasure, and so on). I try to foreground the interstices of social difference as negotiated through music and talk about music. Some similar conversations about racial politics are happening in ethnomusicology, but I see this book as encouraging ethnomusicologists to engage more robustly with current conversations in anthropology.

Lynn Hooker: I am struck by the tension you describe not only between Manouche and Gadjé (non-Romani) identity but also between Manouche and pan-Romani identity. What are the pros and cons of a broader view of Romani-ness for your interlocutors? I myself have observed some musicians and organizers, mostly in Hungary, embracing a more pan-Romani approach in some contexts; this view seems akin to the musical pluralism you discuss in chapter 3, and sometimes it appears to claim cosmopolitan-ness. But it seems from what you imply that some Manouches want to avoid the “taint” of Eastern Europe.

Siv Lie: As I alluded to earlier, some of the Manouches/Sinti I work with have mixed feelings about proclaiming a pan-Romani identity. Doing so has its advantages: it provides access to resources (social networks, logistical support, financing, publicity, and so on) as well as a certain public legibility. It also reflects aspirations to a kind of borderless cosmopolitanism, such as by using “Gypsy” instead of the conventional French terms for Romanies. This can be especially important for musicians who want to be seen simultaneously as part of a global jazz community and as ethnoracially distinctive. They want to counter the idea that they are backwards and unintelligent by playing up their creativity and cultural plurality (as Romani, French, European, and global). Of course, at the same time, cosmopolitanism can be construed negatively, and Romanies are often perceived as rootless and even threatening wanderers. For this and other reasons, Manouches/Sinti sometimes refuse ideas of pan-Romani identity. They may want to avoid politicizing their work through associations with Romani solidarity movements, or they might seek to avoid further racialization by distancing themselves from immigrant Romanies in France.

The important point here is that these stances aren’t definitive. People emphasize different allegiances depending on context, and they change their opinions over time. Such tensions are reflected in the music the book explores. For example, Alsatian jazz manouche has roots in both jazz (a practice so widespread it often gets labeled as “universal”) and Hungarian csárdás, which has specifically Romani connotations. Musicians are very selective about how they use these different legacies depending on how they want to be perceived.

Lynn Hooker: In chapter 4, there is this fascinating discourse where various speakers talk about how they can tell the difference between Manouche musicians and Gadjo musicians by sound–what you describe as ethnoracial qualia of sound. I am curious about something that you do not talk about as much, and that is the practice of jazz manouche among non-Manouche (Gadjo) players. How do the Manouche musicians you work with feel about this?

Siv Lie: Gadjé make up a huge part of the performing circuit within and outside of France and are not necessarily looked down upon by Manouche musicians. In general, there is a lot of mutual respect between Manouche and Gadjo musicians. A Gadjo sound isn’t always considered bad, and not everyone claims there are significant or inherent differences between Manouche and Gadjo sounds. Musicians of various backgrounds often tell me that the most important thing is respect – for other musicians and for the music (however that is defined). Interpersonal problems tend to arise when Gadjo musicians adopt signs of “Gypsiness” and, in some cases, may exploit real or imagined connections to Manouches to further their careers. I don’t think the Manouche musicians I work with are terribly concerned about the whitewashing of an ethnoracially unique practice; those who believe in a distinctive Manouche sound will point to its inimitable qualia, and others might accuse Gadjé of cultural appropriation, but the practice still remains marketable and meaningful for them. More broadly, given the context of Romani disenfranchisement within France, there can be a sense of distrust among Manouches toward Gadjé. It’s not totalizing, but I see it crop up when some Manouche musicians do business with Gadjé and want to ensure that they’re not exploited. That said, musicians of any background tend to be on guard when maneuvering within the music industry, and rightly so!

Lynn Hooker: You started this project years ago, including identifying colorblind racism within French civic society as manifest in, for example, festivals that present jazz manouche but that try to keep Romaniesand Gens du voyage at arms’ length. (This topic is sprinkled throughout the book, but the introduction and chapters 3 and 5 deal with it in the most detail.) How have your interlocutors responded to the recent surge in anti-racist activism around the world?

Siv Lie: Like the US, France is undergoing a very fraught and necessary reckoning with deep-seated racism, energized in part by the protests of 2020. Much of the resistance to antiracist discourse stems from the idea that racism is a US problem, not a French one, and that US understandings of race and racialization are entirely inapplicable to France (so much so that in February 2021, President Macron denounced critical approaches to race supposedly imported from the US, and the minister for higher education proposed restricting research on the topic). Many groups have participated vigorously in these debates, but I haven’t had the chance to probe the issue with my interlocutors. I am really looking forward to being able to travel to France again and talk about all of this. I think aspects of this activism have probably resonated with my interlocutors, especially those who already draw parallels between their own racialization and that of African Americans (see chapters 1 and 4). I’m working to get a French translation of the book published so that it can better contribute to these discussions. For now, I’m not optimistic about any changes within the French state, but I’m glad that colorblind racism has come to the fore in public debate.

Mwenda Ntarangwi on his book, The Street is My Pulpit

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Christine Chalifoux: By focusing your ethnographic attention on the hip hop artist Juliani, you were able to weave together so many important facets of life in Kenya: socioeconomic precarity, self-expression, the influence of the burgeoning youth population, and most significantly for your work, Christianity. Your ethnography especially stands out because it not only takes Christianity seriously as a subject on its own, but you engage in anthropology at home in the religious sense, too. How did your position as a fellow Christian affect the relationship you cultivated with Juliani?

Mwenda Ntarangwi: First, my focus on a single person allowed me to use Juliani as the minimum unit of analysis and work ‘backwards” to establish what made him who he is as a Christian and as a musician. I kept asking myself, “what have been the key influences in Juliani’s life that have led him to become who he is today?” It is this analysis that helped me generate the kinds of questions that allowed Juliani to reflect and share some of the experiences and incidents that shaped his identity at the time that I was carrying out an ethnography on his music and life. It also gave him a chance to identify certain individuals and incidents that had had major influences in his life. Second, as a Christian myself, I was very much aware of many of the possible blindsides of carrying out the study of a Christian artist and had to constantly keep checking on my own biases (against or towards Christianity). I remember once having a deep conversation with Juliani about some of the church members at the congregation that had been exposed as following a preacher who claimed to remove evil in their bodies by duplicitously applying potassium permanganate to look like blood. I told him that they were too gullible and followed without question the preacher’s gimmicks. Juliani shot back saying that each one of them was getting something more than what we can discern intellectually. He insisted that the congregants were not fools but rather strategic players who knew what they wanted from the preacher and were getting it. Third, I came into the ethnography with a specific bias towards Christianity, having edited another book with a focus on the social significance of Christianity in Africa, whereby I juxtaposed the rapid spread of Christianity in Africa and the corresponding expansion of social ills represented by high levels of corruption, disease, poverty, and focus on the occult. At the back of my mind, I was skeptical about any positive role Christianity was playing in Africa and was therefore interested in Juliani because he tended to challenge Christianity and especially the way it was mobilized publicly. He, for instance, challenged certain expected silences towards areas of Christianity that did not make sense such as how Christians would seldom challenge certain ideas about God, especially the idea of God’s power over everything, meanwhile many attending church and professing faith in God were languishing in poverty and abuse. Growing up in a Christian context where we did not have many opportunities to challenge certain narratives about Christianity, I was naturally drawn to Juliani’s messages that engaged critically with Christianity as he understood it. I was straddling the two worlds of curiosity toward Juliani’s challenges of Christianity and my own biases towards Christianity. I had to be very careful not to look for Juliani’s messages that would validate my own biases. Being a fellow Christian further provided a shared position from which to engage but not a shared set of interpretations that would miss the complexity of life of Christians.

Christine Chalifoux: The names of some of the hip hop groups and artists you wrote about, such as Camp Mau Mau and MajiMaji, reference powerful anti-colonial movements in East Africa. Are such references common among youth in Nairobi today? And, if so, are young people able to reconcile violent rebellion with Christianity?

Mwenda Ntarangwi: A number of young people who are politically sensitized do use references to Mau Mau and colonial experiences, especially the fact that Africans were taught the wrong type of Christianity. Their claim is similar to the one articulated immediately after independence when Kenyan political leaders claimed that Christianity made Kenyans docile, allowing colonialists to take all their land while they shut their eyes to pray. There are, however, fewer Christians who combine the political with the spiritual because they often assume that they are incompatible. It is thus quite surprising that in early 2021 well-known Christian artist and preacher Mr. Reuben Kigame talked about Jesus being a social activist and that there should not be a dichotomy between faith and living. This is quite a departure from his earlier songs in which he focused on personal piety and preparation for life after death. The Mau Mau have not been viewed mainly as violent in much of Kenya, but rather as agitators for what is rightfully owned by Kenyans. But the memory of their influences has slowly faded away. There might be some affinity between Christianity and Mau Mau in that they both seek radical change in people’s quest for a better life.

Christine Chalifoux: Basing your ethnography in the urban setting of Nairobi, you were able to avert the temptation of many anthropologists and historians of sub-Saharan Africa, which is to break up the country of study into regional ethnic groups. Despite this, readers can see how ethnic concerns continue to be at the forefront, even in the nation’s cosmopolitan capital. In Chapter 3, in particular, you write about the ways in which Christian missionaries had different conversion tactics for particular ethnic groups. Do you think a Christian identity, or ‘performing Christianity’, to use your term, allows the youth to be more amenable to a larger Kenyan nationality?

Mwenda Ntarangwi: Ethnicity has been mobilized to define identity in Kenya for a long time to such an extent that it is the default mode of defining individuals. When this is combined with political processes that amplify ethnicity, then one can see how ethnicity becomes such a key part of the social fabric of the nation. The idea that Africans were organized around tribes was extended to Christian missionary work and colonial boundary-making processes in forming administrative areas in Kenya. This has now been assumed to be the default standard for leadership in certain locales, even in churches. There is a tendency up till today to have certain church leaders be seen as belonging while others don’t belong, and this is based on their ethnic identity and the denomination involved. The Methodist Church, for instance, remains a church associated with the Meru so much that it is almost expected that the presiding bishop of the church will be from the Meru ethnic group. It is quite telling that only the first presiding bishop of the Methodist Church was not Meru, the other five have all been Meru. Interestingly even cosmopolitan churches such as the Christ is the Answer Ministries, a Pentecostal church that was started by Canadian missionaries in 1918 in Nairobi, has been led in the last twenty years (2002-2021) by men from the Luo ethnic group. Despite these patterns of continuity in perpetuating certain ethnic ideologies, I am convinced that the Church in Kenya has the best shot as bringing about a change in ethnic identity. This is for two reasons: first, the Church is, especially in urban areas, a space where new communities are formed and many of those communities are multiethnic. When there is a critical mass of such community building, ethnic identity will no longer be the primary organizing factor in social relationships. Second, many weddings still take place in church and as more and more interethnic marriages take place the church will be an important space to demonstrate a changed social reality regarding ethnicity. Many younger people (those under 30 years of age) are not all too wedded to the idea of ethnic identity especially if they are exposed to a more multiethnic social context compared to their parents’ generation.

Christine Chalifoux: Juliani asserts that “Kenyan youth mostly recognize two tribes–the rich and the poor,” (15) a claim that foreshadows the lyrics in his music criticizing corrupt politicians. Yet, the campaigns to improve communities described in chapter 4 suggest that he embraces a neoliberal vision for the youth. Throughout the ethnography, you convincingly stress that Juliani’s music focuses on Christianity in this material world, rather than heaven and the afterlife, but there seems to be some contradictions in his vision of political economy. Does Juliani have a clear vision for a more egalitarian economy, and if so, what does it look like for him? Do you think Juliani’s faith and music have the potential for more radical forms of politics?

Mwenda Ntarangwi: For Juliani, society is not fully free until everyone has a chance to follow through with their dreams. He believes that such freedom does not come from political benevolence but that it must be constructed and demanded by the electorate. Making the right choices at the ballot box and holding leaders accountable is an important step towards achieving the kind of society Kenyans need. Juliani is also clear that no one will be given free stuff and each one has to work for the things he/she has. He believes that the youth have an opportunity to change their circumstances through honest hard work supported by the right economic and political structures. This belief is what propelled his song and movement he termed “Kama Si Sisi (if not us)” which is about the youth taking on leadership and owning property today (not tomorrow, as is the common idea that youth are leaders of tomorrow). This kind of hope is not far-fetched because, as I show in my other book on East African Hip Hop, many of the businesses revolving around popular music within East Africa were run and owned by young people. The kind of politics that Juliani espouses through his music (the politics of radical faith) has not quite caught on among many Kenyans because of the enduring assumption that politics and faith are like water and oil, they do not mix. It will take a few more years of consistently breaking such assumptions and norms to get the masses to see the value of using faith to engage with the politics of the day. But given the culture of deceit corruption and outright mudslinging, it is difficult for a Christian to be engaged in fruitful politics in Kenya today. As they say, culture will eat strategy for lunch. Unless the political culture changes to accommodate people of Christian faith, there still will be spaces where Christians will feel like outsiders in politics.

Alex Dent discusses Digital Pirates

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Cover of Digital Pirates by Alexander Sebastian Dent

Interview by Ilana Gershon

Digital Pirates: Policing Intellectual Property in Brazil

Ilana Gershon: At the heart of this book is the intellectually productive argument that intellectual property and piracy are so intertwined that not only do they mutually co-constitute each other under digital textuality, but the same people can support IP wholeheartedly in one moment and talk like pirates ten minutes later.   On the ground, IP and piracy present as sides in a debate, but you argue that understanding this debate in terms of sides is misleading. Could you explain a bit what is misleading about viewing piracy and IP as opposing perspectives and the role digital textuality plays in creating this discursive field?

Alex Dent: When I was researching and writing my last book, on Brazilian country music, I noticed that musical genres were often only taken seriously by social scientists when they were judged to be the fundamental ground of some sort of identity claim.  Were you a hard-core commercial country fan, or were you a member of the folkloric team? What I found, instead, was that the genres offered possible role-inhabitances; people crossed back and forth all the time, but that didn’t mean they didn’t fight about generic boundaries a lot.  I feel similarly here, though in a somewhat different context.  It is indeed true that there are IP maximalists out there who spend a lot of their time fighting for IP.  Along those lines, I didn’t include, in Digital Pirates, the research I did about my study of the United States Trade Representative, where I discovered that the USTR plagiarizes huge amounts of text from industry groups while entirely ignoring the pleas of public interest groups to afford foreign nations the same legal protections citizens expect here in the US; the big pharma and film industry lawyers who showed up for those hearings did, indeed, seem like pro-IP warriors (and for the record, their suits appeared to be made of some non-stick, bulletproof material).  Similarly, on the other side of things, copy-left advocates and hackers often seemed like they were categorically opposed to IP, arguing that “information wants to be free” (an anthropomorphizing if ever there was one).  But the truth is that even these warriors for one or the other position step out of line from time to time.

Even more to your question, the vast majority of us live in that space between all the time.  So it struck me that requiring there to be “positions” actually becomes a way to deliberately avoid the conversation that we need to have – which is about how arguments for and against IP get mobilized for political projects, with quite local approaches shaping that mobilization.

The insistence on positions seems particularly misleading in the digital realm, where inscriptive (which is to say, durable) forms of textuality become such a common part of our quotidian existence.  One of your questions, below, asks me to talk more about cellularity and its relationship to contemporary capitalism – so I’ll hold off on that for a bit.  But the point is simply that decisions about how you are going to govern your own productions now imbricate your every move.  I write in chapter four that the novelty of contemporary digital textuality surrounds the reduction of response-time, the transcendence of space, the unification of communicative modalities in a single device, and the portability of that device. This means that durable and promulgating potentials are with you at every moment.  And the decisions you make about how you are going to circulate yourself are shaped by both IP maximalism and piracy – shaped in real-time contexts, on the fly. So we are not “taking positions” on IP. We are, in a split second, deciding what kinds of circulatory legitimacy accompanies a photograph we just received, or a blog post – or how we might anticipate this video we are currently making about our dog playing in the snow finding itself in far-flung lands.

Ilana Gershon: What does policing look like from the perspective of Brazilian piracy? 

Alex Dent: There has been lots of great stuff written on policing and its importance to contemporary capitalism.  In that ambit, Jim Holston and Teresa Caldeira have done a great job writing about how, in what might seem a paradoxical move on the surface, the turn to democratization has actually led to drastically elevated levels of policing in Brazil; what we can derive from this is the necessity of policing to neoliberal theologies.  With respect to IP, specifically, what I was anxious to do away with was the myth that policing of IP around the world is about bribes or salaries; there’s this idea among critics of IP that the only reason people would police IP in parts of the world where “licit” products are too expensive is because they are being paid.  On the pro-IP side there is this equally misleading notion that local police “just want to be right with the law.”  But the truth is a lot more complicated than either of these options.  The truth is that there are local discourses that explain policing.  In Brazil, discourses of cultural mixture are famous – in tourist brochures, of course, but even in Brazilian self-explanations of prowess in soccer, music, religion, and food (Lorand Matory and John Collins have written about this).  But what you don’t hear about very much are Brazilian anxieties about cultural inter-mixture going too far.  What you find, if you dig into the classic Brazilian book called “Rebellion in the Backcountry” (which is about a millennial movement that gets absolutely destroyed by the emerging Brazilian state in the late 1800s) is that there are localized appetites for “order” and keeping mixture under wraps.  That is what is getting ignited by IP maximalism – not some bribe. So in some ways I’m revisiting that old chestnut about the relationship between the production of locality and the production of globality – with the notion that the dialogic relation between the two must be understood according to durable structures.  It’s no coincidence that violations of IP get treated like “trash” in Brazil.  I explain why in chapter two.

Ilana Gershon:  What role does Paraguay play in Brazilians’ relationship to piracy?

Alex Dent: As a linguistic anthropologist, this was one of those spectacular fieldwork moments when you become aware of how language is a kind of flexible dialogue between historical conflicts and contemporary practices. It’s not a repository, mind you, because it’s constantly in flux. What happened was that my family started characterizing things that broke as “Paraguayan.”  I remember the first time it happened – it was a cheap alarm clock I’d bought which inexplicably failed; and I’d just underscore that the cheapness and the inexplicability are intimately related to one another! In any case, this invocation of “Paraguayan” as a descriptor seemed, in that first moment, to carry all kinds of anxieties about bordering that I hadn’t though of.  That’s when I started learning about Paraguay’s role as the place cheap goods come into Brazil, and also, about its stature in Brazilian popular culture as a place where grand promises are made that then are not delivered upon.  There is some overlap with how the US-Mexico border translates in our context – though there are important differences. But with respect to Paraguay, the history is that Paraguay invaded Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1864, and after some stunning initial victories, they were absolutely routed. The war was just devastating for Paraguay, and in conventional histories, the war’s legacy was a long-lasting economic depression and cultural inferiority complex. (I’d like to note something obvious – that my Paraguayan friends inflect this story with considerably more complexity.) In any case, this phrase circulated periodically in Brazil when discussing a soccer team that started off in a promising way, but then crashed: the team was referred to as a “Paraguayan horse.” 

I ended up spending quite a bit of time in the border towns between Brazil and Paraguay, studying the ways goods traveled from Paraguay into Brazil (although I should add that the real expert, here, is Rosana Pinheiro-Machado).  And it struck me that the bordering work there – with incumbent anxieties about porosity, omnipresence, illegality, and necessity – also populated the way my interlocutors were characterizing the Internet in Brazil.  All of which is to say that, when you are trying to understand just what this thing called the Internet might be, it makes sense to consider localized approaches to time, space, and boundary.

Ilana Gershon: You talk about how Brazilians have a different relationship to cellphones than Americans or Canadians do because they had a different historical engagement with landlines.   Could you explain how these different historical trajectories made a difference in your fieldsites?

Alex Dent: When I first arrived in Brazil in 1998, I lived with a family — who subsequently became my caretakers, consultants, and very close friends – in the town of Campinas.  My Brazilian “dad” was a telecommunications engineer who taught at the local university – UNICAMP.  And in early discussions with him, I noticed that telephones were politicized in a different way fromm Canada, the US, or the UK – the three places I had lived.  I detected a kind of media ideology about telephones where — in part based on consumption of North American public culture – there was this belief that Brazil had developed incorrectly.  Phone landlines were incredibly expensive to get, and were not well disseminated among working class neighborhoods.  Phones were not a forgone conclusion in Brazilian life – they were often thought of as a necessity that was paradoxically also a luxury.  So when cell phones began to arrive, in concert with the neoliberal selling-off of the state phone companies, I heard a lot of people explain to me that Brazil had “skipped” a step; that, in some normative sense, it ought to have had cheap and widely available landlines first, and then people could have transitioned more smoothly to cell phones. I should point out that this popular argument also has a well developed academic Brazilian form in the shape of associated-dependency theory. But the point is that when Brazilians started to absorb cellular technology, their early use was often tinged with a dialogue between ravenous hunger, and a kind of shaming scold.  I heard statements such as, “Brazilians have multiple cell phones, but they are too ill-educated to have anything to say on them,” which struck me as harsh until I decoded where they were coming from, historically.

Ilana Gershon: You argue that cellularity at the heart of contemporary capitalism – could you explain what you mean by this?

Alex Dent: I’m working this up into a broader theory of neoliberal theology now; as I type, I’m writing-up five years of data collected with Joshua Bell (of the Smithsonian) and Joel Kuipers (also at GW) on the productivity of ambivalence among teenage cell phone users in Washington DC.  Part of the argument is that, contrary to the projections many adults place onto teenagers, teenagers are acutely aware of not only the joys, but also the potential harms of cellular phone use.  The productivity of this ambivalence, as I note above, in chapter four, lies in “cellular publics”; I argue that contemporary digital textuality is characterized by reduction of response time, transcendence of space, condensation of communicative modalities, and portability.  But what is significant is the trip to heaven and hell that this entails.  (I should mention someone who has written brilliantly about this in Brazil is Leticia Cesarino.) Because just as cell phones can be celebrated for their rendering work more flexible, they can also be indicted for enslaving us. We are, in the same moment, in joyful anticipation of connection, and in horror at possible over-extension. I’m using “horror” carefully, here – intending to address myself to the brilliant theorist who was Mary Shelley. This is the sublime. And the argument I’m making is that contemporary (probably not “late”!) capitalism’s balance between tremendous wealth and utter ruin finds itself mediated – in ways I think David Harvey anticipated – by way of cellularity. To put it somewhat differently, it is no coincidence that “paying it forward” and “going viral” partake of the same vectors of accrual.

Ruben Enrique Campos III takes the page 99 test

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Destiny again. It had to be El Legendario Bombay. It had to be page 99.

Upon entering, I immediately saw why the place was called legendary. It oozed underground Hip Hop. Graffiti covered every wall. In the past, there had been a waist-high mural that wrapped around the bar featuring skeletons in fluffy rat costumes. Now most of it was covered over in aerosol paint, paint pen, postal stickers, and permanent ink throwies. The above-waist, mirrored walls were now covered over in tattered black plastic tarp, which was itself covered over in white mop paint pen tags. The tile floor was thick with dried beer and tracked-in road grime. Google Maps had not been wrong. The place had been permanently closed; but it was still quite active that night. A crew of two dozen men and a few women sat drinking beer, listening to the Chicano music of my youth. Most of the audience seemed to be in their late 30s. Their clothes were baggier than Heticko’s which was a sign of his relative youth at 25 and the changing trends of a scene. Most wore tan Dickies pants and either a plain white cotton tee-shirt, a tan khaki shirt, or a black one with La Sociedad Café printed in Old-English style font. Most wore thick löc-style sunglasses. The darkly lit scene could have passed as a sepia-toned photograph save for the glints of the deep red and thickly lined lipsticks of the women, and then there was the pop and lock dancer wearing the royal blue tracksuit and white gloves. Two beautifully maintained, chrome laden lowrider bicycles sat on the stage. Tomás, the owner of TT Caps arrived after me. He sat at the bar to chat with El Bombay’s owner. Both were in their late 50s and had invested in Hip Hop as more than a fad years prior. They had both given the youth culture space to flourish, but now had to watch as their business dried up.

My dissertation explores life in desmadre, or the overwhelming, noisy chaos that continually changes underfoot in the streets of the metropolitan valley surrounding Mexico City, the largest urban landscape within North America. I chronicle the experiences of contemporary rap artists as they move through the city, creating a Hip Hop scene in looped interconnectedness. And while my work is attuned to the Voice of these artists, it’s always grounded by my relationship to the streets and by that feeling of destiny I feel when I’m in the wrong place and the right time, when I encounter everything I need to be Hip Hop, to be ethnography. After weeks of futile attempts to find a Hip Hop scene by safe and traditional means, I found Bombay in a moment wondering aimlessly and dangerously down a dark alley in Tepito, a barrio born into its bad reputation. Following that moment, dedication and destiny launched me across the entire valley from La Paz, Iztapalapa and La Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl to Tacubaya, Colina Del Sur, and el Reclusorio Norte, all to find Hip Hop.

Ultimately, I find that by practicing their poetry and their breath control rappers learn to render the aural sensorium and echo the city itself through their bodies—from the noises of its mass transit to the acoustic registers of its ambulant vendors; from the sounds of familiar language games, poetics, and popular culture to appropriated Nahuatl vocabulary and place names. By learning to navigate through the city, flowing against its conservative logic for their own artistic and cultural purposes, rappers come to embody a difficult to explain yet deeply felt awareness of desmadre. Rather than seeing chaos as a source of frustration (to state control), as inefficient (to capitalist profit), or as unnecessary imperilment (to fearful citizens of the general public), rappers find direction and purpose in creativity and community. By engaging with others in desmadre they recognize their place, authenticate their experience, and overcome anonymity through the choral voice, hearing their own subjectivity echoed back and affirmed by others who have travelled a different route. …And so do anthropologists.

It had to be page 99. It had to be El Legendario Bombay. Desmadre again.

Ruben Enrique Campos III.  2020. Word To Desmadre: Hip Hop, Voice, and the Rhythm Of Chaos In México. University of Hawai’i, Phd.