Tag Archives: nationalism

Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler on their book, The American Stamp

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Interview by Pauline Turner Strong

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-american-stamp/9780231208246

Pauline Strong: Congratulations on the publication of your book! I very much enjoyed reading it and I look forward to sharing it with students. To begin our conversation, I’d like to hear what drew each of you to the topic of the cultural history and iconography of US postage stamps.

Richard Handler:  Like many children of my era (b. 1950), I collected stamps as a child, and like some of those people, I returned to stamps in my 40s, working on my collection more or less seriously since then.  It’s easy to immerse oneself in various obsessions of collecting that do not require a lot of creative analysis. I certainly did that (it’s a hobby, after all!), but also, as an anthropologist who studies nationalism, I thought some over the years about the iconographic content of US stamps. (I also collect French and French colonial stamps, but that’s another story.)

There is a particularly striking US stamp, featuring the Sicangu (Brulé) Lakota chief, Hollow Horn Bear and issued in 1923, that has always held my attention.

That stamp gave me ideas for a more extended analysis of Native Americans on US stamps, but I felt I didn’t have the necessary expertise in American studies or Indigenous studies to carry out such a project on my own.

As we explain in the acknowledgments section of our book, Laura and I met when she was finishing her dissertation (in the English department) on Manifest Destiny, conquest narratives, and the closing of the American putative frontier. As we got to know one another (talking about how her work intersected with mine, on nationalism), I got to talking with her about my idea for a paper about Hollow Horn Bear and Indians more generally on US postage stamps.

Laura Goldblatt: I found this topic very interesting for the reasons Richard mentions, but also because I continue to be drawn to questions of state messaging or propaganda. In this regard, postage stamps seemed so ripe for exploration: tiny pictorial messages, designed to travel broadly in their delivery of other messages, that end up in the intimate spaces of the home. And, while senders can control what they send and to some degree what stamps they choose, receivers don’t get to reject delivery because they don’t like the image on their parcel. And neither has any control of what happens as their missives move through the mail. It made me think about government messaging in new ways, as far more multifaceted than the term propaganda implies, but also as completely banal and woven into the fabric of the quotidian.

With that in mind, I also became interested in collectors because I wanted to know how people interacted with stamps, what they did with them, and how these instrumentalized objects could be used for non-instrumental purposes. Stamp collecting is more Richard’s ken, but I nonetheless became intrigued by how different collecting communities—Confederate collectors, Third Reich collectors, and so—described their interests, how they responded to changing political climates, and how they understood stamps’ meanings. Though the casual stamp user is different from these specialist groups, they, too, express opinions about stamps’ designs, have stamp preferences, see the images on their letters, and so on. In fact, the COVID pandemic really underscored how crucial the USPS–and home delivery in particular–remains to the US body politic.

These interests eventually superseded the reservations we both felt about diving into a topic with very little existing academic scholarship on it.

Richard Handler: So we took the plunge, starting with some shorter pieces and then committing ourselves to the book about five years ago.

Polly Strong: One of the main themes of The American Stamp is how the creation, circulation, and collecting of postage stamps contributed to the construction of citizenship during the second half of the 19th century and the entire 20th century. This is a very long timespan to consider! Would you each give an example of a notable change in the social use of stamps over this century and a half?  

Laura Goldblatt: For me, I think the most notable change is from the idea of postage stamps as representing the nation, to postage stamps being indicative of various consumer preferences. For instance, prior to 1893, when you wanted to mail a parcel, you had very limited options of imagery. You either selected the stamp with the exact postage for the item you wanted to send, or some combination of stamps to equal the correct postage—though again, you didn’t have multiple choices for one-cent, two-cent, half-cent stamps: there was just one of those varieties.

But then, in 1893, the Post Office released a set of stamps alongside the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The stamps were sold at the fair itself, where you could also have them postmarked and then keep them as souvenirs. These stamps depicted a variety of images from the narratives of Columbus’s voyages to the Americas.

These were the first commemorative stamps: stamps produced to mark a particular occasion or person and available only for limited time. With the Columbian series, the Post Office realized there was money to be made from such commemorative issues, and more and more were produced over time.

People don’t mail letters as much as they once did, but when they do, they have a wide variety of stamps to choose from, all in the same denomination. The last time I went to the post office, I was able to buy stamps commemorating the 50th anniversary of Title IX, two sheets of stamps from the Black Heritage series—Edmonia Lewis and August Wilson

—and a sheet of stamps dedicated to Shel Silverstein. That is to say, I was able to choose which stamps best represented my values and priorities, rather than solely national values or priorities. I think that’s a really big change in how we understand citizenship and the government’s relationship to citizens. 

Richard: Piggybacking on what Laura said, before the Columbian commemorative stamps, most US stamps feature what we called “dead heads”: the great men (and they were men) of American history. These supposedly definitive stamps were, unlike commemoratives, meant to stay in circulation for many years. For example, most people mailing a letter in the 1940s would have used the three-cent Thomas Jefferson stamp from the Presidential definitive series of 1938.

This type of stamp remained dominant until the post-WW-II period, when commemorative stamps really took off, with more and more new stamps being released, placed on sale, and then withdrawn every year. 

As Laura said, commemorative stamps became a vehicle of consumer choice. But something else was happening: as various kinds of multiculturalism became politically more salient in the last third of the 20th century, the post office found it ever more difficult to produce sets of dead-head stamps that represented the nation in all its diversity. A consequence of this, we argue, is that a different iconography came to the fore for the representation of the nation in definitive stamp series. Instead of featuring representative persons, these stamps featured iconic objects like flags, scenic views, and nostalgic items of material culture. It’s as if on the eve of the 21st century, the post office stalled out on the iconographic recognition of a truly diverse America.

Polly Strong: This brings us to another major theme of the book: collecting. Richard, how was your research on stamp collecting influenced by your previous research on collecting and display at Colonial Williamsburg? Laura, could you comment more on how consumer demand and economic imperatives have shaped postal iconography? What do you make of the marketing of stamps for national, religious, and secular holidays?

Richard Handler: Your question suggests another chapter to be written, comparing genres of collecting. We focused on two aspects of stamp collecting: the creation (over time) of a system that defines collectible objects and assigns values to them; and the ways in which individual collectors interact with that system. One of the striking things about stamp collecting that is not true of all genres of collecting is the high degree to which the average collector, with very little financial investment, can interact with the larger system to create collectible objects—for example, by sending letters to oneself, stamped with interesting stamps, which will be returned, postmarked. I’m not sure what the analogue to this would be in the art or museum worlds. That’s the next paper to write!

Laura Goldblatt: Richard mentioned the post-WW II explosion of commemorative stamps. Looking at the pattern of new commemorative issues since then, it seems clear that the post office has responded to the increasing number of requests for stamps coming from various demographic and interest groups not by articulating a new or revised model of ideal citizenship but simply by producing stamps for each group. I mentioned the Black Heritage Series, which is a response to those who want Black culture celebrated on US stamps. But what are we to make of the 1995 Civil War commemorative series, which honors both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Frederick Douglass and “Stonewall” Jackson?

Rather than make a political decision about how to commemorate the Civil War—a decision that might lead to the depiction of only Union actors, and thereby offend Lost Cause warriors—the post office treated both Confederate and Union figures as equals. Similarly, the advent of special stamps for Christmas in 1962 was not hindered by critics who worried about the separation of church and state, but led instead, over time, to stamps for Hanukkah (1996), Kwanzaa (1997), and Eid (2001).

This is the kind of consumer logic we see at the grocery store: do you like one brand of milk or another? But the fact is that Confederates are not the same as Union soldiers, nor is honoring various religious holidays the same as refusing in principle to honor any. In sum, the US stamps program has come to instantiate a consumer logic: letting the market decide instead of deciding that some political positions ought not to be celebrated by the state.

Polly Strong: I really appreciate hearing about the new directions your research could take now that the book is published. I’d like to close by asking each of you about the collaboration that gave rise to this book. Richard, in addition to your single-authored books and edited volumes, you have co-authored an unusual number of publications for an anthropologist, including The Fiction of Culture (with Daniel Segal); Schneider on Schneider (with David Schneider); The New History in an Old Museum (with Eric Gable); and now The American Stamp. Why has collaborative work been so compelling to you? Laura, in addition to The American Stamp you have been working on a single-authored monograph, After Destiny: Propaganda, Settler Colonialism, and Community, and you have published both single authored and co-authored articles. What do you see as the rewards and risks of collaborative work as an early career scholar?    

Richard Handler: The simplest and in some sense truest answer I can give is that writing with a co-author is more fun than writing alone! Perhaps fun isn’t quite the right word; to put it slightly differently, co-authoring is a social experience in a way that solo writing (which is also, of course, a social experience) is not. Co-authoring means you have someone to talk to about the work that is important to you; and co-authoring only works well if you enjoy talking to your co-author about your shared project.

Beyond fun, I am a person who is conscious of my scholarly limitations: what I’m good at and not so good at, what I know and what I don’t know. Co-authoring is a sensible response to one’s limitations; it allows writers to share in each other’s expertise. It also allows for quick and engaged feedback, as when you call up your co-author and say, “I can’t figure this out, can you help me,” or “I can’t make this paragraph come out right; will you see what you can do with it.”

A final thought: egalitarian co-authoring requires both a strong ego (you have to be willing to write your fair share) and a lack of ego, in the sense of allowing the other person’s ideas and writing to change yours. 

Laura Goldblatt: I’d echo Richard in the list of rewards. I often think of all writing and thought as collaborative. Even my single-authored publications and research grew out of a series of rich conversations with others, and aid that included reading and commenting on drafts. Co-authorship makes those collaborations visible. I also just really like co-writing. I largely decided to go to graduate school because of how thrilling—really!—I found class discussions about rich and complicated ideas as an undergraduate. Co-writing takes that process beyond the classroom.

In terms of risks, co-authorship often isn’t legible to others as legitimate scholarly work, which is a problem as an early-career academic. It can also make it difficult for peers and search committees to glean what my expertise is separate from that of my co-authors. But still, the benefits for me far outweigh those risks. I’ve learned as much about scholarly and professional praxis from Richard as I have about stamps, which is a kind of mentorship I think we could all gain from.

Laura Goldblatt is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where Richard Handler is Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies.

List of Illustrations

  1. Cover, The American Stamp, 2023, https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-american-stamp/9780231208246
  2. Hollow Horn Bear, 1923, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/the-american-indian-in-postage-stamps-profiles-in-leadership-the-paths-of-great-sioux-2
  3. Columbian Exposition issue: Landing of Columbus, 1893, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_1980.2493.1609
  4. Black Heritage series: August Wilson, 2021, https://uspsblog.com/celebrating-black-heritage/
  5. Presidential series: Thomas Jefferson, 1938, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/about-us-stamps-bureau-period-1894-1939-definitive-issues/presidential-series-1938
  6. Civil War commemorative series, 1995, https://www.amazon.com/Civil-Sheet-Twenty-Different-Stamps/dp/B008G3G2RI

Joshua Babcock takes the page 99 test

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“It’s about sarees or some shit.” This sentence—probably my favorite in the dissertation—comes from a group interview with Chand Chandramohan, Diva, and Seelan Palay, the organizers of Singapore’s first all-South Asian contermporary art series, From Your Eyes to Ours. The quote shows up on page 99 for the second time in the chapter, just before the chapter’s conclusion starts. In this quote, multidisciplinary artist Chand Chandramohan summed up a series of assumptions that were routinely articulated by racially hegemonic Singaporean perceivers upon encountering the art event: that to be an Indian-Singaporean artist is to do “Indian art”—that is, to (re)produce traditional South Asian forms for Indian audiences—thus denying the possibility of their participating in contemporary art aesthetics.

Like most places existing in the wake of racialized/racializing modernity, in Singapore, to “belong” to a race is also to “possess” a language—at least ideally. Later on page 99, I note that the three co-organizers gave the title “Yes, I Speak Indian” to a visual art exhibition that occurred as part of From Your Eyes to Ours. This title acted as a form of shorthand satire, critiquing a recurrent assumption that “Indian” is a monolith, a single community that possesses and uses a single language.

Yet more than this, the organizers of From Your Eyes to Ours voiced and critiqued a deeper presupposition: that to invoke “Indian” in Singapore is to invoke not only a race, but also to legitimate Race. Referenced via the shorthand CMIO (an acronym standing for Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other Singaporeans), Race-capital-R stands as the sum total of all the “races of Singapore,” a self-evident, totalizing structure that shapes raciolinguistic hierarchies in the present without actually being total.

Beyond its contents, page 99 exemplifies my dissertation’s broader political stakes. Page 99 presents large stretches of the interview with Chand, Diva, and Seelan as theory-work, rather than relegating it to the status of mere evidence provided by an “informant.” Like the dissertation, page 99 also doesn’t shy away from the political: from deep, close engagement with the critiques of raciolinguistic hegemony, oppression, and marginalization that were generously articulated to me by my co-theorists in Singapore. Similarly, like page 99, the dissertation confronts my own status as a raciolinguistically hegemonic perceiver, as a token of a privileged type capable of accessing prestige registers of English, elite education, and white-passing privilege—among others.

Joshua Babcock. 2022. Image and the Total Utopia: Scaling Raciolinguistic Belonging in Singapore. University of Chicago, PhD.

Guilherme Fians takes the Page 99 test

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On page 99 of my dissertation, the reader finds themself in the middle of an ethnographic description of a heated political debate held during the 101st Universal Congress of Esperanto, in Nitra (Slovakia) in 2016. In this debate, members of the World Non-National Esperanto Association were reflecting on the aims of their activism: should this association use Esperanto to create inclusive, internationalist conversation spaces where people from different national and linguistic backgrounds could gather and meet halfway by speaking a non-national, non-ethnic language? Or should they adopt a more combative stance and use Esperanto as an anti-nationalist tool to fight the exclusionary and xenophobic aspects of nationalism?

fian.photo

Entrance of the congress venue, the Slovak University of Agriculture, where the 101st Universal Congress of Esperanto took place. The Esperanto flag between the Slovakian and EU flags helps to convey the internationalist atmosphere at stake in the Esperanto gathering [Photo: Guilherme Fians].

While page 99 brings us to a brief diversion to Slovakia, my doctoral fieldwork – which placed my dissertation as the first extensive ethnographic study of Esperanto speakers and activists – was carried out mostly in France.

Constructed in the late nineteenth century as an attempt to promote mutual understanding between peoples through language comprehension, Esperanto has been historically associated with internationalism, gathering a community of speakers and activists that strategically connect this language with diverse global political platforms. If, in France, Esperanto used to be particularly prominent among anarchists, communists and pacifists, what is this language’s current political relevance? What impacts have new communication technologies such as social media had on the organization of this community and language movement? Through participant observation – in French and Esperanto – and archival research concentrated in Paris, I mapped out how Esperanto activists use this language in online and face-to-face debates to question the post-political consensus about the use of national languages (such as English and French) for international communication.

Approaching a moment of significant changes in the way people communicate and mobilize politically, I found that Esperanto frequently works as a gateway for people to engage with other political causes, such as movements for open-source software and against neoliberal globalization (like the Gilets jaunes in France). Within these frameworks, Esperanto activists depart from the fight against linguistic discrimination and a preference for participatory over mass communication to re-politicize acts of communication and contribute to radical politics.

Reaching back to Nitra, where both this blog post and my fieldwork began, the outcome of that debate was that any form of internationalist or anti-nationalist stance can prove productive, as long as it fosters more egalitarian and inclusive communicative exchanges through the international circulation and co-production of information, ideas and knowledge.

 

Fians, Guilherme. 2019. Of revolutionaries and geeks: Mediation, space and time among Esperanto speakers. University of Manchester, PhD dissertation.

Hilary Dick on Words of Passage

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Cover of Words of Passage

Interview by Alejandro I. Paz

https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/dick-words-of-passage

Alejandro I. Paz: Your book follows the ways that, given the entanglements between the US and Mexican economies, Mexicans who don’t migrate still imagine what their lives might be like on the other side of the border. Why is looking at the Mexicans who don’t migrate important and how does such a study illuminate the relation between the US and Mexico?

Hilary Parsons Dick: I use the term “nonmigrant” to refer specifically to people who haven’t migrated, but who live in places with active migration pathways, like the neighborhood where I centered my ethnographic research in Mexico, in which nearly every household has a member with migration experience. In this neighborhood—and in the migrant enclave in Southern Pennsylvania where I also conducted field work—images of life “beyond here” profoundly shape people’s understandings of relationships with their family and the countries of Mexico and the United States. This reality resonates with a way Arjun Appadurai described globalization, as a process that that leads people to live their lives refracted through other possible lives they imagine they could live elsewhere. I wanted to understand how such refraction, such imagining, unfolds in practice and with ethnographic particularity. The connections nonmigrants forge with the imagined lives of migrants offer a productive vantage point from which to explore this problem.

I found that considering how Mexican nonmigrants live in the company of imagined fellows illuminates the role ideas about migration play in nation-building and, especially, the variegation of national belonging: the idea that not all people who are legally authorized to be in a territory are positioned as fully belonging to it. As the anthropology of nationalism and citizenship has shown, such variegation is a key feature of nation-building across settings. And, as studies of immigration and citizenship law in migrant-receiving countries show, including your fabulous book Latinos in Israel, imaginaries about who migrants are or can be contribute profoundly to the constitution of variegation. One of Words of Passage’s contributions is to show that migrant imaginaries also play a central role in shaping national belonging in migrant-sending countries. Certainly, this has been the case in Mexico. Since the late 19th century, migrant imaginaries have helped organize what it means to “be Mexican” in ways that are consequential to the people with whom I did my research, as I discuss later in this interview (the third question). As for how this process tells us about the relationship between Mexico and the US, scroll down to the fourth question.

Alejandro I. Paz: More than anyone else in linguistic anthropology, you have theorized migration discourse, and in your book you have expanded that term’s scope, using history, ethnography, and close readings of transcripts. How does this combination of methodologies enable you to tackle the question of how migration discourse impacts, and is adapted by, working class Uriangatenses?

Hilary Parsons Dick: One of the key things I aimed to do in Words of Passage was to theorize the “imaginary” in a way that gives it concreteness. This concept is used frequently, but often without being fully operationalized. Yet, it is a productive concept for thinking through how the variegation of national belonging is produced and enacted. As Words of Passage shows, the (re)creation of imaginaries is fundamentally a discursive one. And critical to understanding the production of imaginaries of Mexicanidad/Mexicanness is studying talk and writing about the causes and consequences of migration—or migration discourse.

The combination of methodologies highlighted in your question grows from the understanding of discourse that undergirds the book. I analyze discourse in the Foucauldian-genealogical sense and in the linguistic anthropological sense of actual language-use. This approach allows me to show how particular moments of interaction contribute to broader processes, like the variegation of national belonging. To track whether and how imaginaries produced or authorized by the state, what I call state-endorsed imaginaries, inform the lives of actual people, I needed to establish that there are enduring state-endorsed imaginaries, which people variously contribute to, adapt, reformulate, and/or resist. I also demonstrate how people achieve these ends in interaction, through producing their own imaginaries of Mexicanidad that are informed by state-endorsed imaginaries, but which also critique and revise them in ways that envision their full belonging in the country.

Equally important to examining migration discourse in Mexico historically, ethnographically, and textually is the transnational aspect of my ethnographic research. Although Words of Passage focuses on the lives of nonmigrants, the insights it offers are deeply informed by the dual-sited fieldwork I did. This research helped bring into relief how the experience of migration is different for migrants and nonmigrants—and, also, how imaginaries of national belonging are informed by and resist the framings of Mexican migrants in the US.

 Alejandro I. Paz: Class is an important aspect of this study. You encourage us to think about the interpellation of the Mexican working class. You show how interpellative processes work their way through gendered, religious, and racial dynamics. What does such a study reveal about class in general and the Mexican working class specifically?

Hilary Parsons Dick: The concept of interpellation, understood as a process of call-and-response in which one is hailed to see oneself as a member of the nation-state and variably responds, is essential to the way I theorize the production and enactment of variegated national belonging. The assertion is that imaginaries of national belonging are a form of interpellation that call to people to see themselves as being part of the nation in ways that are not uniform or egalitarian.

In Mexico, state-endorsed imaginaries of Mexicanidad have designated certain groups as simultaneously representing the true “essence” of the nation, as embodying what is means to “be Mexican,” and also the country’s central obstacles to achieving full sovereignty and economic power. These paradoxical positionings create a double bind of belonging for people identified as part of these groups. As in many other contexts, this process of designation is raced, classed, and gendered: it is indigenous people, women, and rural peasants and the urban working-class who state-endorsed imaginaries place in the double-bind. I focus on class and gender in my study because the people with whom I did my research are monolingual, Spanish-speaking mestizos who identify as working-class, but have a certain race privilege as part of the unmarked racial category in Mexico. Words of Passage shows how people who occupy the position of “working-class” respond to the state’s interpellative call, taking up some of its terms while revising others. This type of analysis is relevant to the understanding the lived experience of class—and race and gender—in Mexico. And I think one could address a very similar set of problems in any modern nation-state through the theoretical framework I lay out.

Alejandro I. Paz: You write about the importance of the foil of the US, and the ethical and moral judgments made of the US, for how Mexicans have come to conceive of national belonging. Are there moments where the imagining of life in the US is more intense for Uriagantenses, and what regulates that intensity?

Hilary Parsons Dick: The lives of nonmigrants, and their experiences of variegation, add another layer of understanding to the enduring entanglements between the US and Mexico. Migration, not only the act itself but discourse about it, has been pivotal in producing this enmeshment politically, economically, and socioculturally since the late 19th century. People in Mexican migrant communities on both sides of the border are acutely aware of this fact—a common saying I would hear was that the US economy was built by la mano de obra Mexicana, by Mexican labor. Indeed, migration politics in the US would probably look very different if the profound, positive contributions migrants make were held in the center of the discussion.

More specifically, both state-endorsed and working-class Uriangatense imaginaries of Mexicanidad are ordered around a concept of moral mobility: the idea that Mexico and its people should “progress”(be mobile) economically, but in a way that is moral, where “being moral” is understood as the opposite of “being US.” So, being Mexican has historically and contemporaneously been about not being like the United States, posited as a land of economic opportunity, but moral depravity. For working-class Uriangatenses, it is Catholic understandings of personhood and collectivity that inform what “being moral” means. Imaginaries of moral mobility, therefore, are both visions of what the “good life” is and also a form of political commentary that rejects the imperialism that marks the US’s relationships with Mexico. For working-class Uriangatenses, and also for their relations living in the United States, there are times when this ethico-moral encounter with the US is more intense. These typically correspond with moments of impending cross-border movement, whether it’s going back to Mexico or facing US-bound migration.

Alejandro I. Paz: Have you been surprised by the way the new right in the US, apotheosized in the presidency of Donald Trump, has successfully turned up the temperature on migration discourse to gain political advantage? What do you see will be some of the results of this intensification of anti-immigrant messaging and policy for working class Mexicans, and especially do you think it will reinforce or change the kinds of imaginaries that you describe?

Hilary Parsons Dick: I am not surprised that the contemporary right-wing populism in the US, and elsewhere, has been bolstered by an intensification of (anti-)migration discourse. Since the 1970s, the US Republican party has used fear mongering about migrants to boost their political fortunes—and not all migrants, but racialized groups, such as migrants from Mexico and Central America. Throughout US history, there have been periodic moral panics about the migration of racialized groups, ginned up for political advantage. Generally, these happen at times of economic contraction and restructuring, like the neoliberalization of the global economy, in which political elites make racialized migrants into scapegoats for economic woes. So, Trump and his ilk are building on long-term racial projects and political economic strategies. One way they are contributing to these processes is by using migration discourse to endeavor to re-mainstream overt racism, which became taboo in public discourse after the Civil Rights movement: a problem I am working through in my second book.

The consequences of the intensification of right-wing migration discourse has been the authorization of policy measures and practices that have created a shameful humanitarian disaster on the US-Mexico border, and within other sectors of the US deportation regime. These policies disproportionately affect migrants from Mexico and Central America. The use of anti-migrant discourse to legitimate ever-more draconian policies is a practice that has been going on since the late 20th century. Though now this ratcheting up of the ‘law-and-order’ approach to migration is happening with even more vigor and extremity, as the Trump administration disregards some of the factors that used to partially temper such crackdowns, such as compassion for children and families and a commitment to family reunification.

Given the devastating impacts of crackdown policies, I doubt that core elements of Mexican imaginaries of moral mobility—which critique the US’s imperialist stance towards its southern neighbors—will change substantially. In many ways, recent events provide fodder for their reinforcement. In addition, return migrants have consistently been positioned as important figures in Mexican state-endorsed imaginaries—as both harbingers of “progress” and as threats to state power. The mass deportations of the Obama and Trump administrations have led to a large number of return migrants who present complications for Mexican state institutions. It will be interesting to see whether/how older framings of returnees are taken up as the Mexican state manages this period of return.

At the same time, since my ethnographic research for Words of Passage ended in the mid-2000s, Mexico has undergone a dramatic transition to becoming a country of significant migrant passage and reception, as migration from Central America has increased. This transition is forcing Mexico to reckon with being a nation of immigration and not just emigration. In this, the Mexican federal government is increasingly adopting policies that mirror the US crackdown approach. This suggests that it is producing a new state-endorsed migration discourse that situates Central American migrants in ways that unfortunately mirror how Mexican migrants have been positioned in US state-endorsed migration discourse.

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway on her new book, Signing and Belonging in Nepal

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http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/bookpage/SABINbookpage.html

Interview by Rebekah Cupitt

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway’s book, Signing and Belonging in Nepal (2016) captures the ongoing and changing nature of both deaf Nepali and Nepali life in general. It especially marks the shifts in how deaf Nepalis perform their identities through sign language and the relation with the larger socio-political changes occurring during the many years she has visited Nepal. She traces the ties between the caste system and notions of ritual pollution associated with the stigma assigned to deaf people, then shows how deaf signers in Nepal used an ethnolinguistic model of deafness to address this stigma, while navigating the resonances of this model with the politics of language during the Nepali Civil War. Her book also examines how the drive for Nepal to become a modern bikas (developed) nation in the eyes of the global economy influenced interactions between hearing and deaf Nepalis. Erika ends by considering how deaf signers’ practices for framing and labeling different forms of signing may be shifting in the post-war period.  I should note that during our exchange, Erika explained that although she used the d/Deaf distinction in the book at the request of the editors at Gallaudet (she had originally used local terms), in more recent works she follows the lead of deaf anthropologists who are moving away from that particular typographical distinction. The terminology used in this interview reflects that.

 Rebekah Cupitt: Could you discuss how the political changes that occurred after the People’s War have further impacted signing and deaf belonging in Nepal. For instance, is there an instance of deaf signing practices from that period which is indicative of the current political situation in Nepal?

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: I noted in the book that, since the end of the war, the structural inequalities embedded in Nepali governance have shifted slowly and unevenly in the forging of a “new Nepal.” However, symbolic changes have occurred more readily, specifically with the grounding of nationalism in caste Hinduism becoming less overt. One obvious example of this type of change, which I discussed in the book, was the 2006 appointment of a new national anthem for the secular republic. The lyrics of Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka, or, “Made of Hundreds of Flowers,” are widely understood to signal a commitment to a form of nationalism that is explicitly multicultural and multiethnic and can be seen as an attempt to performatively call forth a not yet realized political landscape, one characterized by the inclusion that adivasi janati (indigenous) groups had struggled for in the war.

In this post-war context, then, efforts to link standard Nepali Sign Language (NSL) forms with caste-Hinduism have become a less necessary and effective way to align with explicit symbols of Nepali nationalism. In the book, I addressed how pictorial images of NSL signs served as public resources through which signers could access the cannon of lexical items understood to constitute standard Nepali Sign Language, and also as a tool through which signers were encouraged to create boundaries and linkages between a range of linguistic practices, different forms of representation of such practices, and social types. This use of the creative indexicality of images continues in the post-war period, of course, but the particulars of these practices are shifting along with the changing grounding of Nepali nationalism.

For example, I am currently working on an article in which I analyze deaf artist Pratigya Shakya’s illustrations representing a NSL version of the new National Anthem. Shakya’s pictorial representations of signing practices entail representing signing bodies, both performing and embodying (through, for example, their clothing) the social groups which the signs individually and collectively reference. Thus, in order to recapitulate the new anthem’s explicit claim that Nepali nationalism is widely inclusive, the collected figures Shakya painted performing the signs represent a range of types in terms of social (caste, ethnic, and geographic) variation. Here then, the inclusiveness referred by the anthem is materialized in the figures performing the signs, as this group of figures collectively indexes a social persona of “diverse Nepali.”

Rebekah Cupitt: In Chapter 3 and 4, you talk in detail about signing practices and how they are lexically tied to Hindu traditions in some cases, and in the case of homesign (sign systems developed by deaf Nepali who grow up without access to NSL, see Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016:70), traditions and socio-economic origins are framed as less desirable from perspectives grounded in hegemonic Hindu nationalism. I know that your research makes for an important comment and account of deafness in Nepal but do you see your work as commenting on Nepali culture and religion through deaf eyes and the situated performance of sign language thus offering a counter-narrative of Nepali life?

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: While the book focuses on the practices of signers, in order to understand the political economies of their efforts to link linguistic forms to social types, it was necessary to consider scales “beyond directly observable and recordable face-to-face interactions” (Inoue 2016:153; Gal 1989). That is, it wasn’t just that I had to try to understand the ethnographic moments in which I participated within a broader social and historical context, but more specifically that I had to analyze the processes through which deaf social actors themselves understood and enacted such scalar relations (see Carr and Lempert 2016). So in that respect the book indeed seeks to highlight deaf perspectives on broader Nepali social life.

In some cases, these perspectives reproduced the hegemonic hierarchies of the state within deaf social worlds; in order to navigate the difficult period of the war, deaf leaders didn’t just work to associate NSL signing practices with the middle-hills caste-Hinduism in which Nepali nationalism was grounded. Rather, as you note, these processes also involved contrasting this cluster of practices, qualities, and affiliations with an opposed cluster that could serve as their foil (Irvine and Gal 2000). This broader project also involved work to associate homesigns with non-caste Hindu practices and qualities, in so doing replicating broader hegemonic discourses. At the same time, however, this diverse network of deaf signers did not universally share these bundles of associations. Thus, I also tried to highlight the ongoing semiotic work deaf leaders engaged in (such as leading workshops and creating images that highlighted links between signs and social qualities) in order to make these kinds of interpretive habits cohere, to some degree and for some duration.

On the other hand, the way that some signers recruited the concept of porous personhood as a tool to reduce internal hierarchy within deaf social worlds offered a counter-narrative not only of broader Nepali life but also of many enactments of ethno-linguistic models of deafness. Specifically, in some contexts, deaf people who begin to sign later in life, and whose signing shows the effects of such late-learning, may find their status as ethno-linguistically deaf challenged. Nepali signers who drew on understandings of distributed personhood to distribute linguistic competence, thus challenged not only Nepali models that would enjoin “polluted” signers to avoid contact with others, but also the internal hierarchies that can characterize the way that an ethnolinguistic model of deafness may be understood.

Rebekah Cupitt: Porous personhood as a concept is a compelling analytical device through which the social collaboration involved in becoming deaf is powerfully rendered, especially the stigma attached to it but it also forms the distinction between Nepali Sign Language signers and home-signers. Could you discuss how this notion of personhood has shifted given the decreasing focus on Hindu caste systems and the karmic model of deafness and a Nepal-wide more towards ideologies focused on development (bikas) and modernity?

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: In Chapter 5, I focused on The Bakery Café, a fast food chain in Kathmandu that hires and advertises the presence of deaf wait staff, as a way to think through this question. I pointed out that, since food was an especially effective medium for the transmission of pollution, hiring deaf waiters to serve in a restaurant chain was a risky proposition when the venture launched in 1997. However, I suggested that The Bakery Cafe was successful not in spite of the fact that the deaf waiters would “traditionally” have been understood to transmit pollution, but in large part because publicly accepting food from deaf servers created a way for customers to generate and display modern personas that hinged on a contrast with such “traditional” frames.

I should add that it’s possible see the Bakery Café’s hiring of deaf staff as part of a neoliberal commodification of linguistic and social variation, which might suggest that an individualizing frame would be overtaking a notion of porous personhood in that context. However, as Inoue (2016:166) notes, “the neoliberal self is produced through processes of “dividuation” as much as “individuation” (Inoue 2016:166), as persons are fractured into shifting bundles of qualities and skills. And, as Friedner (2015) describes concerning Indian businesses that attempt to extract value from deaf sociality, businesses hiring deaf workers may take advantage of the ways in which deaf signers work to share and distribute skills among themselves, saving the management some of the work of training and creating team dynamics. Similarly, in Nepal, it seems that models of deaf sociality generated in part through the concept of porous personhood have been productively exploited as deaf workers are incorporated into such work contexts. So, to address your question more specifically, my point is that these ideological frames and the embodied enactments of them have not replaced one another linearly, but have rather resonated together in complex ways.

Rebekah Cupitt: Are you able to speculate perhaps on what a focus on disability or the non-linguistic aspects of deaf culture potentially brings and/or removes from a study of deafness in Nepal? Given the strength of the ties between the ethnolinguistic model of deafness and the now less-popular Hindu nationalist movement, how might deaf personhood and belonging in Nepal appear differently should deaf identity be theoretically decoupled from language? 

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: To think through this question I need to be clear that concepts like personhood, identity, or disability are grounded in forms of semiosis (signification or meaning making). Linguistic practices can’t be easily separated from other modes of semiosis (see Nakassis 2016). For example, though much of my book is ostensibly about Nepali Sign Language, as the set of practices that ground an ethnolinguistic framing of deafness, consider how much of my discussion focuses on modes of semiosis that are generally considered non-linguistic, such as drawings, clothing styles, or food. While linguistic practices are explicitly centered in the meta-semiotic debates I analyze in the book, many of those practices center on forging or disrupting perceptions of entanglement between these linguistic practices and other modes of meaning.

Even as I want to keep in mind that language does not function independently of other types of meaning-making, however, working in a context in which many people (such as homesigners) have not had sufficient access to linguistically mediated sociality does make clear that linguistic semiosis is a distinctive and vital form of signification. Because deaf people often suffer from being cut off from sociality when shared linguistic practices are inaccessible, it’s difficult to imagine a politics of deafness in which language plays no role. However, there seems to be a lot of scope for variation in terms of how language is ideologized in deaf framings of personhood and larger scales of belonging. For example, while communicative sociality via accessible modalities will, I think, always be central, it may not always be seen as necessary to ground Nepali understandings of deafness in the perceived use of a particular named language like Nepali Sign Language, nor to posit hard and fast distinctions between named signed languages, spoken languages, written languages, gestural practices, and homesigns (for example, Kusters and Sahasrabudhe 2018).

Rebekah Cupitt: It strikes me, on reading the later chapters in Signing and Belonging in Nepal that deaf Nepalis have unique opportunities to engage with the international deaf community beyond receiving aid, sometimes even travelling to these countries, and therefore deaf Nepalis have access that other Nepalis, especially those from the lower castes and socio-economically poor ethnic jats lack. Towards the end of the book, you discuss what it means to be deaf and how deaf identity has changed in response to the political structure of Nepal, but I wonder if you could reflect on the potential for the deaf Nepalis you know, to themselves become drivers of change and not simply respondents – either on a national, local or global front.

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: I closed the book by saying that, “ultimately, I hope to have shown that deaf Nepalis will not only continue to respond to local and transnational change, they will also continue to actively participate in making such change” (Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016:116). Such changes may occur in part through the relationships that deaf Nepalis forge with signers from other countries – relationships that can entail travel but which are also enacted over media like Facebook and YouTube. For example, Pratigya Shakya, the deaf artist whose work I often discussed in the book, prolifically posts videos in which he provides artful portraits of Nepali and Nepali deaf life, which he addresses to a global “Deaf World.” Other signers, like Dipawali Sharmacharya, work with international organizations to create programs to help deaf Nepalis access language, schooling, and work opportunities, while yet others, like Upendra Khanal, have been publishing linguistic analyses of NSL that can affect local and transnational framing of Nepali signing practices (e.g., Morgan, Green, and Khanal 2016). However, given that broader social constructs (including both “Nepal” and the “Deaf World”) are generated (if not in predictable or controllable ways) by the interactive engagements they mediate, all deaf Nepalis are actively engaged in collaborative and contested ways of producing, shaping, and changing their social worlds.

 

Carr, E. Summerson, and Michael Lempert, eds. 2016. Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. Oakland: University of California Press

Friedner, Michele, 2015. Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Gal, Susan. 1989. “Language and Political Economy.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 345–67.

Hoffmann-Dilloway, 2016. Signing and Belonging in Nepal. Washington D.C.: Gallaudet University Press.

Inoue, Miyako. 2016. “Where Has ‘Japanese Women’s Language’ Gone?: Notes on Language and Political Economy in the Age of Control Societies.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 151–77.

Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal, 2000. Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (Paul Kroskrity, ed.): 35–84. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Kusters, Annelise and Sujit Sahasrabudhe, 2018. Language Ideologies on the Difference Between Gesture and Sign. Language and Communication 60: 44-63.

Morgan, Michael, Mara Green, and Upendra Khanal, 2016. Sign Language: Southern Asia. In The Sage Deaf Studies Encyclopedia (Genie Gertz and Patrick Boudreault, eds.): 815-817. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Nakassis, Constantine, 2016. Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language.  American Anthropologist 118(2): 330-345

Damien Stankiewicz on his new book, Europe Un-imagined

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https://utorontopress.com/us/europe-un-imagined-2

Interview by Ilana Gershon

Ilana Gershon: You open Europe Un-Imagined by suggesting that while the television channel you studied aimed to fashion a European identity, in practice they may well have succeeded in creating more fragmentation than cohesion and might do more to make borders visible rather than to transcend them.  What led you to this argument?

Damien Stankiewicz: First, Ilana, thanks for this question and this interview! I’m so happy to have the opportunity to discuss my book with you—and I’m a big fan of the CaMP blog!

I guess I would say that it wasn’t so much that the channel was creating fragmentation as much as it wasn’t producing coherence—and I see those things as quite distinct, because one of the central aims of the book is to challenge the validity and ubiquity of Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined community. If the channel were indeed “creating fragmentation,” one could argue that the channel demonstrates that Anderson’s theory remains intact—that it was indeed creating fragments of European belonging (national belonging, regional Alsatian belonging, and so on) in the ways Anderson stipulates, it just wasn’t able to create a larger European identity. My argument, in contrast, is that the channel’s multifarious efforts—whether to combine national identities into a European one, to create something European de novo, to draw on “Culture” in order to build culture—that these various strategic and narrative pieces never accrued into something recognizable as a coherent imagination in the way that Anderson evokes it as a shared narrative repertoire and collective mode of thinking-the-world.

Instead, I found that producers and programmers at ARTE, though all charged with the same mission statement of producing television and web media that would “bring together the people of Europe,” went about doing so in quite disparate ways, even sometimes within the same production unit and even while working on the same program. It’s possible, of course, that people working towards different goals and with different strategies, harboring uneven convictions about the power of television to create culture (much less what culture it should create) could nevertheless result in a program, format, or entire channel that would convey a coherent message or set of narratives. Indeed, media scholars and anthropologists have rarely argued that cultural producers have uniform goals or sensibilities. But at the end of the day (after eighteen months of fieldwork), it was not only my sense that things didn’t quite add up to a shared set of premises for the coalescing of a trans-European sensibility or identity among viewers—it was also the sense of those working at ARTE, who told me that the channel wasn’t achieving what it hoped to (or at least hadn’t for a number of years); that the channel was bureaucratically and/or administratively flawed; that audiences didn’t care, or no longer cared, about French-German rapprochement, much less about Europe; and that the transnational production process led to all kinds of glitches, misunderstandings, and obstacles that were to great degree insurmountable. I describe numerous examples of these glitches, misunderstandings, and what I call silences in the book.

So it isn’t that ARTE is producing fragmentation as much as the channel, largely by its own admission, runs up against all kinds of difficulties—both in terms of the array of competing ideas about what the channel should do and how, as well as sheer geographical and structural hurdles—which ultimately thwart ARTE’s efforts to produce a European imagined community in the ways its founders, seemingly emulating Anderson, had thought possible and actionable.

Ilana Gershon:  What role did audience numbers play in the kinds of audiences ARTE staffers imagined and how they understood appropriate responses to a changing media landscape?

 Damien Stankiewicz: As I describe in the last chapter of the book, transnational audiences present ARTE with a number of difficulties. France and Germany have different, somewhat incompatible methods for measuring viewership, for example. And the imprecisions of counting and comparing French and German audiences and viewer profiles led to lots of speculation as to why a particular program or film would garner strong audiences in one country but not the other. As I describe in the book, audience studies staff would often explain contrastive audience numbers through broad reference to national preferences and interests. A documentary about chocolate did well in France but not Germany because the French are more interested in chocolate than Germans. And so forth. The parsing (and ultimately, ambiguities) of audience “analysis” at ARTE was, for me, another example of the channel’s inability to conceive of itself as something other than bi-national, fragmentary, and ultimately incoherent.

At the time I was doing fieldwork, methods for measuring online streaming and downloads were still being figured out. For example, if someone clicked on a video and began watching it, but then immediately stopped the video and didn’t watch the rest of it, ARTE’s audience department didn’t know whether to count this as a “view.” And they couldn’t locate the viewer, either—so if they closed their browser and started watching again, it would be counted as an additional “view”… and so forth. During my time at ARTE, and during follow-up fieldwork in 2014, it was clear, however, that ARTE was in many ways leading the way in developing streaming and app-based viewing technologies. In part this has to do with its recognition that its viewers, who are distributed across national borders, would benefit from digital technologies that were not contingent on traditional/terrestrial networks and infrastructures—and indeed I was told that this digitalization has paid off: ARTE now has a thriving trans-European digital viewership that has greatly augmented and expanded its pre-digital, principally French-German audiences. (Interestingly, this has meant increasing use of English in ARTE’s subtitling, website, and app, which has long been anathema to a channel that was established in part to stave off the invasion of American programming into Europe.)

Ilana Gershon:  You kept observing people’s ambivalence about some forms of cultural identification at the same time that cultural stereotypes abound at the station.  What work do you think this ambivalence was doing in a television station dedicated to programming identity?

Damien Stankiewicz: I think this was one of the most fascinating aspects of my research at ARTE. Overwhelmingly, in a European borderlands where people are quite aware of the complicated, composite nature of people’s backgrounds and identities, people readily referred to each other and their way of doing or thinking about things as “typically” French or German. French-ness and German-ness remained centrally important categories and explanatory resources even as I observed that many of the stereotypes were simply not true (if in fact I counted to see if more French women at the channel wore lipstick than German women, as bizarre an exercise as that was). People were highly invested in such explanations and in the coherence of French and German stereotypical behavior, even in a context in which most staff had lived or grown up in multiple countries, spoke several languages fluently, had strong regional (Alsatian, Bavarian) attachments, and so forth.

And yet, in keeping with this complexity, a number of staff with whom I spoke were quite critical of stereotype (agreeing that it was pervasive at the channel, and problematic) and a number of folks offered quite interesting critiques of identity, which they understood to be either irrelevant or retrograde to ARTE’s mission.

This co-presence of both outright national/cultural stereotype, as well as staff who had nuanced articulations of why such stereotypical banter was unacceptable, attests to the diversity of views and sensibilities at the channel. I thought I would be able to discern a pattern, some kind of rhyme or reason, that would explain the dynamic between stereotype and refutations of objectified national culture—but it wasn’t clear to me that there was any simple relationship. I didn’t find that stereotype was principally tongue-in-cheek or used jokingly, nor did I find that only people who had lived extensively in several countries held more self-conscious views of culture or identity; ARTE was a place where both views, sensibilities, and ways of understanding social difference existed, and sometimes in the same individuals. But in the everyday life of the place, it was stereotype and national character/culture that shot through everything from birthday toasts, to sound editing sessions, departmental meetings, and even hiring and administrative decisions. And this was a puzzle I think I never fully understood.

Ilana Gershon:  French and German journalists were understood to have different reporting styles and different editing styles.  How did this affect journalists when they were trying to create transnational or European stories?

Damien Stankiewicz: This is an important question, because it helps me to clarify and nuance one of the book’s running arguments, which is that much of what was considered “French” and what was considered “German” was actually either erroneously categorized as such, or else was interchangeably so. A running argument in my book is that French-ness and German-ness at ARTE were made to be much more coherent and explanatory categories than was actually the case, if you paid close attention. (Which is why I refer to individual staff in the book as “French-identifying,” “German-identifying,” and so on according to how they self-presented or talked about themselves instead of relying on my own assessment of who they were or where they were “from.”)

But there were of course some patterns of behavior that tended to be more French or German (in the sense that they were geographically bounded/bordered). And editing styles in ARTE’s newsroom are an example where real, nationally organized differences existed: The French journalists tended to assemble stories as they went on, piecing together footage and voiceovers alongside their editors and figuring out the narrative as they worked, while the German journalists tended to first write out the story and find the footage, noting time codes and so forth, before going to the editing room.

However, as I try to be careful to specify in my discussion of these newsroom norms, though these differences were often talked about as “German” and “French” ways of editing—often made to converge with other cultural stereotype about French proclivities for loquaciousness or indecision versus Germans’ decisive, methodical organization—they should be circumscribed more narrowly in particular kinds of schooling and training. They aren’t simply “French” versus “German” ways of doing things, but have to do with how journalism is trained and learned in particular institutions in the two countries. Indeed, there were French journalists trained in Germany who assembled stories the ways the German journalists did, and vice versa. In this way, it is much more accurate to talk about French-trained journalists versus German-trained journalists than it is to talk about French-ness or German-ness in sweeping cultural stereotypical terms. As I note in the chapter, we could probably trace particular editing practices to a handful of brick-and-mortar schools of journalism in the two countries (as well as other practices in the ARTE newsroom, which escape this bifurcation, to other schools) in ways that help us to remember that national borders, identity, or “character” do not generate particular practices, but rather particular practices tend to come to be erroneously characterized as broadly national.

 Ilana Gershon:  What were the different approaches to the culture concept that French and German staffers had, and why do you think they had such different approaches to culture?

Damien Stankiewicz: Here again is an example of the complexities of French-ness, German-ness, and Europeanness at ARTE—and which circles back to why Europe is ultimately “un-imagined” at ARTE (and perhaps why it remains largely un-imagined well beyond ARTE).

I spend a good deal of my “culture” chapter tracing the history of French and German concepts of culture, la culture, création, civilisation, Kultur, Zivilisation, and parsing these against historical differences between France and Germany in terms of such longue durée topics as courtly manners (à la Norbert Elias) and the emergence of the Ministry of Culture in France. But I argue that, while such cultural histories may clarify some of why French-identifying staff at ARTE understand “culture” in a way that skews towards the fine arts, while German-identifying staff have a broader, more anthropological sense of the word, the devil is really in the details: “French” and “German” notions of culture and Kultur are in fact inflected by other kinds of understandings—about the arts, about identity, about belonging—in ways that render these words less decisively “French” or “German”—whether in a historical or practical sense—than they might initially seem. What’s more, in the everyday workings of the channel, various staff held variously hybrid views of culture that drew unevenly on “French” versus “German” delineations (if we can argue that these exist and can be cleanly separated in any useful way). It would perhaps make things simpler, in terms of negotiation and the production of something evenly French-German, were there to exist an absolutely clean distinction between French and German notions of culture; the channel could broadcast culture theme nights or some nights and Kultur theme nights after other nights and maybe everyone would be satisfied—but it hardly breaks down this way and so cannot be negotiated in this way. The problem is that sometimes people at ARTE—and myself sometimes, too—would want to contort discursive-semantic ambiguities like this one into easily recognizable differences and categories—and I think this may be why, on some deeper level, (“national”) difference came to be misunderstood, mis-attributed, and then, because oversimplified, exacerbated.

 

 

 

 

Keith Murphy on his new book, Swedish Design

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http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100526160

Interview by Ilana Gershon 

You explain in your book that Ikea is “a simple microcosm of the social democratic order” (p. 202), which might surprise some Ikea shoppers who don’t think in terms of a politics of form.  Could you explain how you trace in your book the ways that design in Sweden is viewed as self-evidently a political project?

I think outside of Sweden and the Nordic countries, most people’s familiarity with Swedish design (if there’s any familiarity at all) starts and ends with IKEA, since it’s the largest furniture company in the world, and one of the most recognized global brands. But yes, this doesn’t mean that the long history of ideological links and influences between social democratic politics and design — especially furniture design and industrial design — are easily gleaned by, say, shoppers in Illinois, California, or Hong Kong. But in Sweden, it’s a different story.

The core premise of the book is pretty simple: in Sweden there are lively and vibrant connections between political values espoused as traditionally “social democratic” — equality, transparency, care, and others — and the design of everyday things, including furniture and other home goods (think IKEA), cars (think Volvo), interior architecture, and so on. According to the cultural logic sustaining these relations, everyday objects, just like the state, are designed to take care of people in their everyday lives, and this is not by accident. But what does that really mean? How are these connections between things and politics actually constituted, how are they maintained and cultivated, and who is invested in perpetuating them? Perhaps an even simpler way of phrasing it is, “Swedish design is political, but how exactly is it made to be political?” If shoppers in Illinois, California, or Hong Kong don’t readily recognize the cultural and political background of the furniture carefully staged in IKEA showrooms, but shoppers in Sweden do (at least to some non-trivial degree), that’s an indication (to me at least) that there’s something going on in Sweden that’s worth taking a closer look at.

Of course it’s difficult to analytically apprehend Swedish design — and “design” more generally — as just one simple category, or one more or less coherent thing. You can’t talk about Swedish design without focusing on particular forms — typical modernist forms like squares and straight lines — or particular discourses, social actors, institutions, practices, and more. All of it matters, irreducibly. While design historical analyses tend to center and elevate famous designers and their famous objects, it’s a perspective that often leaves out so many other relevant conditions that render design and designing more than simply stuff and its making. Which is to say, you can’t really just look at one factor, like iconic chairs, or superstar designers, in order to understand the cultural and political significance of design. Instead you’ve got to follow how these factors connect and alight upon one another, across a bunch of different domains. And ethnography is a really good way of doing that.

So in the book I trace some of the different ways in which design has been constructed and cultivated as a sociopolitical project in Sweden, moving between different domains, and focusing on different forms at different scales. I follow the progression of discourses of both “good design” and “a politics of care” in Sweden from their modern origin in the 19th century up through their more recent manifestations in the early 21st. I look at specific social actors, including not just well-known designers, but also politicians and activists from the past, and less well-known designers of the present, to explore the harmonization of ideologies between design and social democratic politics over time. And I examine different institutions and their practices, including the small-scale motions involved in studio design work, and the exhibitionary protocols of museums, fairs, and even IKEA, to show how objects acquire different but complementary meanings in their circulations through social space. All of this is directed toward understanding how design, acting as a method of world-making, gives form — including specific shapes, objects, discursive forms, forms of social organization, political forms, and more  — to the everyday world in Sweden.

How do you think that a strong training in linguistic anthropology shaped your analysis of Swedish design?

There are probably dozens of ways in which my background in linguistic anthropology helped push the kind of analysis I ended up producing in this book, but I’ll stick with three. First, I think linguistic anthropology, especially the version I was trained in at UCLA, really rewards attention to small details. One of the earliest lessons I learned in linguistic anthropology, when I was a first-year undergraduate at the University of Chicago, was that language, a phenomenon so familiar, intimate, and present in our lived experience, is practically bursting with unrecognized meaning, which you can start to see clearly once you turn your gaze toward the details. When I started my fieldwork — which, by the way, was originally more concerned with hand gestures and body language than with design – this attraction to small details was my basic stance for conducting research. So I guess it wasn’t surprising that I transposed that training onto an analysis of common forms in furniture and other designed things, stuff that, like language, suffuses everyday experience but whose complex webs of meaning are typically just barely recognized.

Second, I think theories developed and worried in linguistic anthropology are widely applicable beyond the domain of language (a point that Costas Nakassis usefully articulated in 2016). Of course there has been a longstanding trend in the social sciences and humanities to use language as a model for explaining non-linguistic phenomena (“linguistic magic bullets,” as Charles Briggs has described it). But from my point of view, one of the problems with this trend has been trying to apply an analysis based on linguistic properties onto non-linguistic things, rather than using the theory to understand the properties of the things themselves, for what they are (that is, not trying to make them “look like” language). This is why Pierce is so useful (as opposed to, say, Saussure), because his semiotic is derived from logic rather than from language, which means to analyze material objects from a Piercian perspective, you’re not forced to transduce a language-based model into some other semiotic framework, and thus assume some analytical lossiness in the process. But it’s not just Pierce and semiotics that helped me examine Swedish design. I ended up drawing on Austinian performativity, and, quite unexpectedly, the version of pragmatics offered by Deleuze and Guattari, because these perspectives resonated with how design work is accomplished in the studio. Assumptions derived from Goffman, Garfinkel, and the Goodwins about how meaning is activated and transformed through social interaction, and Duranti’s close attention to the various forms that politics takes across social modalities, all of this undergirds much of my overall analysis. Basically, it feels like (to me, anyway) linguistic anthropological theory is very useful for understanding pretty much anything.

Finally, and this relates to the previous two points, linguistic anthropology really prepares you to pay attention to form. Whether it’s thinking through sociolinguistic variables, allophones, collections of conversational instances or similar hand gestures, and more, we often find ourselves dealing with linguistic features that, from a phenomenological point of view, exist as formally distinct, yet from a social or analytic point of view, are treated as examples of the same thing, that is, as having matching forms. I sort of adopted this idea and ran with it, to see how far I could take it: that social forces work to match different forms in ways that allow them to be seen as examples of the “same thing.” Thus, in Swedish design, squares and equality, chairs and democracy, and blonde wood and care, all of which obviously take different forms, can nonetheless be made to formally “match” one another through complex semiotic processes.

I was wondering if you could explain a bit for readers of this blog one of the very imaginative arguments of your book, an explanation of how designers who are in a profession that is supposed to be constantly innovative manage to create an internationally recognizable Swedish style. 

Part of my argument is that designers themselves are only partially in control of the designs they create. This is obviously true when we look at constraints like the design brief, which can specify things like an object’s materials, size, costs, colors, etc. And clients can often intervene and ask for changes in a given design (this is usually not something that designers appreciate). But there are other conditions that, in combination, tend to lead to the preservation of a particular Swedish design style over time, even as designers themselves innovate in their own work.

I try to trace this across different domains, including in the studio, where designers sit quietly at computers sketching the lines of their objects and talking their ideas through with colleagues. One of the things I began to notice when I watched and re-watched video recording of these interactions is that there is a strong preference for “typical” Swedish design forms, like squares, rectangles, and straight line, that regularly plays out in the ways that designers talk and evaluate their work, accompanied by a dispreference for deviations from this norm. That is to say, emergent designs that “look” or “feel” Swedish tend to get publicly assessed as “good,” while those that “look” more experimental are assessed less judiciously. One effect if this is that “Swedish looking” objects tend to get more designerly attention, and tend to make it through a design process intact. This, even while designers shy away from overly affiliating with some normative concept of Swedish style.

There are other factors that preserve and cultivate Swedish design. Many institutions like museums, galleries, media, government and semi-government authorities, and stores like IKEA all have some investment in stitching together design style, material objects, and social democratic ideology. Designers may themselves see this investment as antithetical to their own individual creativity, however once they release their objects into the world, they lose significant control over how those objects are described, re-described, and displayed. And there’s a network of loosely orchestrated social actors and institutions in Sweden always prepared to render actual tokens of design as examples of a more abstract “Swedish design” type.

There’s more to it, of course, but I want to point out that at different scales and in different ways, language is crucial to the project of cultivating Swedish design. It’s not just about specific objects and their forms, but rather how language and form and political values co-constitute one another in and across cultural domains in Sweden.

If you could imagine the anthropology of design becoming a vibrant subfield, what are the still unexplored questions that scholars could start tackling?

I’m obviously biased, but I definitely think the anthropology of design should become a vibrant subfield. And in some ways it is already! I’m certainly not the first anthropologist to deal with design, although when I started doing this work in the mid-2000s, I did face a fair amount of skepticism. But nowadays there are lots of anthropologists, in North America and Europe in particular, who are turning an analytical eye toward design in one way or another.

There is a bit of a problem, though, in terms of how an anthropology of design might continue to take form. It’s similar to the problem that Alfred Gell discusses at the start of his chapter, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” while ruminating on the anthropology of art: to what degree are anthropologists who study design “captured” by their own object of inquiry? Designers, many design researchers, and – frankly – capitalists of various stripes, love to tout the salutary power of design without fully acknowledging design’s many downsides (of course what this means depends on what particular kind of design you’re looking at). One worry I have is that anthropologists of design get seduced by the very seductive discourses of design that espouse the kind of “goodness” we’ve come to desire in ourselves as a discipline. I often feel myself falling into this trap. But on the other side, there’s also the possibility that anthropology’s sharp critical edge will dismiss design as, yes, a tool of capitalism, and thus an oppressive force that should be pushed back against and heavily critiqued. This is something that I also often feel. It seems to me, though, that a dynamic anthropology of design should tack back and forth between these two perspectives, to not settle on one particular hill, but rather to turn a skeptical but curious gaze toward the vast valley in between, figuring out what design is, as a form of human action, and what it’s doing for particular groups of people in their particular social worlds.

In my book I’m offering a close analysis of design in Sweden. I’m not claiming design works this way everywhere (clearly it doesn’t), but I do hope that I’m providing tools for people to use to examine how design works in other contexts. It’s sort of a truism at this point to say that design is political, but one of the things that anthropologists can offer is a critical analysis of how design operates as a political force in different parts of the world. We can also explore design as a mechanism of social control; or as aesthetic hegemony; or as a generator of ideology; or as a mediator between institutions and ordinary people. A design anthropological framework can be applied to more than just objects. It can be applied to cities, processes, spaces, infrastructures, and more, and it will always include people, things, ideologies, and practices, without necessarily excising any one (or more) of them. Basically, I think there are innumerable projects that a design anthropological framework could be useful for.

 Has your fieldwork for this project changed how you buy furniture or other objects for your home?

Yes and no. When I came back from the field, I decided I needed to buy much nicer furniture for myself, because living in a comfortable, beautiful home is — according to the Swedish model — a kind of care. But I quickly discovered that the furniture market in the US is basically split into only two segments: the low-end stuff, like IKEA, Target, and the MDF things at Crate & Barrel; and the high-end stuff that I really can’t afford. There isn’t really any mid-market furniture, stuff that looks nice and is of decent quality, but that isn’t super pricy. So I’ve basically had to stick with IKEA (sometimes moving up from MDF to actual wood or metal!) and some other random used furniture. But I do now pay a lot more attention to how I decorate my place, and how I use color in my apartment, and the materials of the things I buy (I’ve recently entered a cork phase, for some reason). Lighting is important, too. And I’ve recently decided to do what many of my Swedish friends have done: invest in nice furniture slowly, over time, but always prioritizing it as something worth spending money on, because feeling comfortable in your space is a worthwhile goal.

 

 

 

Nina Sylvanus on her new book, Patterns in Circulation

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http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo25126083.html

Interview by Ilana Gershon

If you found yourself sharing a taxi to the AAA conference with a media anthropologist studying Chinese soap operas, how would you explain your book’s major points?

It’s funny that you mention soap operas since some of the names that are given to the (pagne) cloth that features at the heart of the book are named after (or inspired by) the characters of popular Ivorian and Latin American soap operas. A pattern called “Ricardo’s suitcase” for example is named after the hero of a Brazilian telenovela, and there are many others that broadcast images about power and politics, beauty and wealth, and romance and conflict between men and women in global West Africa. I’d probably continue to talk more about the framing and analytical connections between television, cloth, and the global-local mediations of popular culture, but let me get to the book’s major points.

In the book I take a mundane object –the pagne or the boldly patterned wrap that women wear in large parts of West Africa—to trace its origins, paths of circulation, and its technical and social production from Holland to Java, from Togo to the broader West African region, and now from China back to Africa. Drawing upon archival research and multi-sited fieldwork, the book theorizes the material economies of this iconic commodity (so-called Dutch wax cloth), born out of 19th-century Dutch colonial efforts to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, and reborn as a cultural and status marker for West African women. I think of this wax-printed cloth as a vibrant object and an assembled commodity, whose fabrication is uniquely entangled in both imperial circuits of commerce and more recent controversies over piracy and appropriation.

At the heart of this work are two metaphors. First is a visual metaphor: “pattern”–the idea of (memorable) recurring forms that we see and recognize across time and space. Secondly, there is “dense materiality” –the notion that there are properties inherent in the cloth that gives it material agency, and yet it is manipulated by its wearer and brought to life by the body. Through analysis of the cloth, my book reveals the making, unmaking and remaking of relationships between things, people, and the institutions that govern them. While the material object is at the center of the story, the book pays close attention to its various uses and to the way it extends out into different spaces: into the market, into the world of national Togolese politics, and into factory floors in Holland and China.

 

Chapter 3 focuses on analyzing wax cloth as a medium central to political spectacle and the formation of Togo as a nation, I was hoping you could talk a bit about the analytical implications of engaging with cloth this way.  Taking cloth to be a medium particularly well suited to the political in Togo allows you to add to Benedict Anderson’s argument about how national identity emerges, and am hoping you can talk about how using cloth makes this a specifically Togolese form of nationalism.

To answer this question is to address the chapter’s central arguments about how a material object such as cloth helped forge national identity in intimate and public terms in Togo. I have to start with the Nana Benz’s role in the representational order of the nation. The term Nana Benz refers to the powerful Togolese cloth traders who controlled the West African wax cloth trade from the 1950s to the 1990s, until political crisis, neoliberal reform and Chinese knock-offs derailed their hold on the economy. Named this way because these market ‘mothers’ used their wealth to buy the Mercedes Benz cars, which they then lent to the long time president-dictator, the Nana Benz built their financial power by controlling the circulation of cloth and embedding the cloth’s semiotic power (and their branding power) into the order of the nation. The Nana Benz made the nation both intimate and palpable, by trading on national associations in the popular pattern names they bestowed on pagne, thus enabling ordinary Togolese to partake in the narrative of nation-building through their everyday consumption of cloth.

Anderson’s argument about print capitalism is useful for considering how wax cloth (pagne) reached the masses, solidifying communal identities while registering national, ethnic, and gender differences. This is what makes cloth a particularly well-suited medium to the political and the specific brand of Togolese nationalism. The efficacy of this particular type of cloth and its association with Nana Benz-style nationalism is reflected in the common stories Togolese remember about the cloth traders, which offer insights into the way the Nana Benz (and their powerful stock in trade) captured people’s imaginations.  My analysis draws out the “dense materiality” of cloth and the way it can at once evoke sentiment and move imaginaries and bodies while grounding the political and the nation in its materiality and visibility. Because cloth provides a surface for multiple narrations and representations (the literal image layered onto the cloth for everyone to see and the bundle of unbridled meaning it generates and that is open for manipulation) it was made to work as a medium that inscribed and disseminated the political spectacle and embodied power. For instance, when the portrait of the Togolese dictator Eyadéma (in power for nearly 40 years) appeared on cloth, the fabric literally captured the body politic during political spectacles when wearing the presidential party pagne became practically obligatory.

 

During the course of your research, how to be a successful trader transformed to such a degree that who was or could be successful shifted dramatically.  Could you explain how trading cloth changed to such a degree during those ten years that the Nana Benz was replaced by the Nanette?

One of the most dramatic events that fundamentally changed the nature of the regional cloth trade was the 1994 currency devaluation of the West African CFA franc: when the price of cloth doubled over night and practically turned an everyday consumer good into a luxury item. At the same time, shifts in global production, the liberalization of Togo’s political, economic and public spheres and the undoing of the old system of cloth distribution, which had granted the women traders exclusive retail rights to the (Dutch) designs, all weakened the Nana Benz’s place in the market. With the breakdown of national protections in post-Cold War Togo –amidst the crisis of the state, the unraveling of the dictatorship and national structures (Charlie Piot describes this process brilliantly in Nostalgia for the Future)– the Nana Benz’s position as entrepreneurial nationals diminished, if it wasn’t devalued all together.  So when this system fell apart, a new set of female Togolese entrepreneurs, the Nanette, began collaborating with Chinese companies to produce better and better imitations of Dutch wax, undermining the very basis of class distinction in Togo as well as throwing wax cloth production and distribution into chaos.

Over the course of a decade-long fieldwork (2000-2010), I witnessed the struggles, and in some cases the financial ruin, of the old guard of cloth entrepreneurs whose profit margins continued to decline while some Nanettes accumulated fortunes. Although the Nana Benz initially denigrated the new China prints that the Nanettes distributed to cash-constrained consumers as fakes, some of the older women entered the China trade with varying degrees of success. For the new trade required a new kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity and savvy, including the ability to operate multiple trades at the same time.  As subtle neoliberal actors, the Nanettes fashioned themselves entrepreneurially through the flexibility of cloth, moving themselves and cloth in and out of Chinese factory floors. But tinkering with cloth design, engineering copies while teaching Chinese manufacturers about the qualia of cloth — its texture, color, and smell— to enhance its sensuous and aesthetic properties is also a high-risk affair. I saw several Nanettes ruin themselves when the containers of cloth they had commissioned arrived at the port with unsellable (that is, faulty) merchandise. Navigating the fluctuations of a market where profit is made from the speed of copying and moving things transnationally, requires a distinct set of entrepreneurial dispositions. A successful Nanette not only appropriates neoliberal logics but she mobilizes an autonomous set of practices and subjectivities by constantly moving herself and cloth, cultivating close relationships with powerful port brokers, and involving herself with innovative open-source design and production.

 

What does the story of China’s role in Africa look like when one begins by looking at the trade relationships surrounding cloth?

The circuit of capital built in the corridor between Africa and China is often portrayed as the new axis of South-South exploitation in Western media and policy discourses. Lurking behind this new axis are often ideological fears about the decline of the West in the world and the appearance of new global empires. Simplistic descriptions of Chinese neo-colonialism fall short in accounting for the complex ways that objects enter into and make social life, history and transnational trade. Looking closely at the materiality of trade and cloth allows moving beyond clichés about new forms of colonialism to ethnographically study what Chinese investment in Africa means for the people who work and live there.

What I try to show in the book is how China-in-Africa or China-in-Togo for that matter is made through complex patterns of coproduction and cross-positioning. Nanettes traveling to China leverage considerable agency with Chinese manufacturers who depend on the women’s deep knowledge about the qualia of cloth and consumer taste. These are intimate encounters, when traders spend weeks at a time on a single factory floor and become producers of their own brands. Which does not mean that traders and consumers view the dominance of Chinese goods on local markets as unproblematic. There are many symbols, metaphors and stories that are associated with Chinese traders who dupe the population with low quality goods in the city. Yet beliefs about the aggressive business practices of Chinese traders are often contradicted by the traders’ actual practices.

I am currently in Togo to work on my new project on Chinese investments in the Lomé port (Harboring the Future) and have had time to reconnect with the China-trading women in the market. While some complain that there is no longer money to be made in Chinese cloth (partially because there is too much of it), others speak of a strengthened partnership with their Chinese manufacturers. Certainly, what this trade relationship surrounding cloth reveals is the patterning of a new phase of global capitalism–whether that is capitalism with “Chinese characteristics” à la Aihwa Ong or a new form of (last) frontier capitalism remains to be seen.

 

Goebel interviews Lauren Zentz on her new book

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http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?K=9781783098460

Interview by Zane Goebel

Briefly, what is this book about?

In this book I explore the history of power and human movement throughout the Indonesian archipelago in order to understand the scaling of language forms that has taken place over centuries, during colonialism and the development of the post-colonial state, and now in an Indonesia coping with the processes of ‘globalization’. I collected my data during a 2 month stay in Central Java in 2008, a 10 month stay in the 2009-10 school year, and another 2 month stay in the summer of 2013. My participants were English majors at a Christian university; I spent the 2009-10 school year teaching courses in their department ranging from Sociolinguistics to introductory speaking for first year majors. I recruited my focal participants in my Fall 2009 Sociolinguistics course. Over the course of our year together I interviewed the participants in individual and group settings, and spent time with them and other students outside of classes over dinner, coffee, church, or at their family homes.

In this book I first discuss the theoretical concepts I used to interpret my data, then I explore the history of power and migration throughout the archipelago. I relate this history then to the development of Indonesian as a national language, and to contemporary use and ‘loss’ of Javanese, the primary local language of Central Java. Finally I discuss the overwhelming presence of English in Indonesia, and how the ‘state project’ generally relies on and resists English and its presence in the country. In all, this is an examination of how these three languages fit within the national project, and how the state continues to try to influence the ways in which they are used and the ways in which they are tied to the national, local, and global identities of their citizens.

Which field(s) do you think your book engages with the most?

This book engages with the fields of Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, and Applied Linguistics. I’ve been a lifelong ‘jack of all trades, master of none’, and so I prefer to reach across disciplinary boundaries as much as possible in trying to gain a holistic picture of my research context. It is in this sense that I find it useful to rely on the label of Applied Linguist, as through this title I feel less beholden to any one field, and I feel like I can drive my work toward my long-term end goal of improving societies through education, language learning, and intercultural exchange. I am also not a fully ‘pedigreed’ Linguistic Anthropologist, and so it is possible that a reader from the field of Linguistic Anthropology will find my work ‘not anthropological enough.’ And so again, the application of the Applied Linguist label, I feel, allows me more freedom to take my work in whatever directions I feel interested in for the purposes of the project at hand and for my own long-term goals.

Who have been the main scholars that have inspired you as you have written this book?

I have most strongly latched onto in my work the writings of Jan Blommaert, Alastair Pennycook, and Monica Heller for theory, and onto Anthropologists of Education for my methods, namely through foundational coursework with Perry Gilmore for Discourse Analysis, with Norma González for general field methods, and with Richard Ruíz for Language Policy studies.

Besides the normal suspects of Linguistic Anthropologists, Applied Linguistics folk and Indonesianists, who do you see as your main readership?

This is clearly a book for graduate students and professionals in the field. I hope that readers will take away from this book the importance of situating our work within deeper historical contexts. Part of this importance for me comes from the desire to explain that Indonesia’s current historical context is not the way it is simply because of the development of the nation-state in reaction to European colonialism. Many of Indonesia’s current sociolinguistic facts are due to human currents and power dynamics that have been going on for far longer. Those deeper historical dynamics are possibly much more evident on islands farther away from Indonesia’s political and cultural ‘centers’ like the islands of Java and Sumatra. It is probable that in Java we in fact see some of the consequences of colonialism and statification as much more influential in contemporary life, or at least that we see them quite differently across contexts within this one expansive country.

What do you think were your best strategies to help you get this book completed?

For me the answer was keeping a schedule. I’m no proponent of one size fits all solutions, but for me, having a life outside of my work is a serious key to maintaining sanity. During summer writing periods I would keep a regular 8-5ish work schedule with exercise before or after (or in the middle if I was getting antsy) work time, and I would take regular work breaks consisting of a walk outside (100 degree Fahrenheit heat be damned!). During semesters, I would limit teaching work to teaching days, and I would keep the other days of the week as research-only days. Tasks like grading were reserved for times when I was too tired to do much thought-intensive work.

As you wrote the book and reflected on your research methodologies, did anything strike you as something in need of change?

For me the biggest thing was adding the historical component. As I began writing my book I just felt that this was an empty story without that. So I spent a lot of time during the writing process digging into historical accounts of how Indonesia has come to be. Another important thing to me was taking time to problematize terms that earlier I did not have the time nor the experience to problematize; words such as ‘globalization’ and ‘translanguaging’/’polylanguaging’/etc. For the former I reached across disciplinary boundaries to see how other fields approach this term, and for the latter I took more time to delve into writings on these topics, from across linguistic fields.

Has this book motivated you to start the next book/project? If so, then can you tell us a little about your new work.

I’m not sure if writing a book inspires anyone to write another one! But I will admit that having written a first book makes me feel more confident in having a go at another one. That being said, I am currently reminded daily that having this experience under my belt does not make a second project go any faster or smoother. I have moved on to two new projects – neither in Indonesia – and starting from scratch is simply starting from scratch, no matter whether it’s your first, third, or fifth research project. It all just takes lots of time, reading, data collection (and revision and revision and revision), note taking, and patience.

 

Ieva Jusionyte on her new book, Savage Frontier

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Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border by [Jusionyte, Ieva]

Jusionyte, Ieva. 2015. Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Interview by Ilana Gershon

What led you to study the conjunction between security and news reporting in this particular town?

I have first heard about the region encompassing parts of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay–commonly called “tri-border area” or “triple frontier”–through the media. It was portrayed as a dangerous place, a haven of organized crime, where trafficking of drugs and people, contraband, and money laundering were rampant. Having worked as a news reporter, I was aware that journalists tend to write stories that fit into larger narratives, which media organizations adjust depending on market logic as well as on their relationship with the government. We know that the media can both work as a propaganda machine, serving to uphold state ideologies, and it can be used as a watchdog on the political and economic establishment. My decision to go to the tri-border area was motivated by a wish to understand how local journalists, who live in the town about which they write, maneuver and maintain the boundary that divides illegal activities into two categories: those that can be made into news and those that must remain public secrets. Unlike reporters sent by national or international media, who come to the border looking for sensational stories and often reproduce the narrative of the violent and savage frontier, local journalists are also residents of the area, so they are directly invested in solving existing problems of crime and insecurity in their neighborhoods at the same time that they seek to depict the place as a safe destination for tourists. In the book, I show the day-to-day realities of journalists, as they balance between making news and making security, and argue that media practices in a remote border area must be understood within the historical context of state violence in the region.

How does turning to news-making as a fieldsite illuminate a distinctive connection between national identity and national security?

News-making is a key site in which national identity is produced and through which it is circulated. The idea that the press serves as a vehicle for creating nations as “imagined communities” is attributed to Benedict Anderson, and although his thesis has drawn criticism regarding the historical accuracy of his claims as they apply to Latin America, it continues to illuminate the process and the conditions of nation-building. Perhaps nowhere is this as clear as it is in the borderlands, at the edges of nation-state sovereignty, where the airwaves of one country compete against those of its neighbor’s. In the second half of the 20th century, when Argentina, Brazil, and other states in the region became concerned with national security (this was especially notable during the military regimes), the governments began paying much more attention to media broadcasters in border areas: investing in radio and television infrastructure, as a means to spread political discourses emanating from the state’s capital, was akin to defending the nation against a foreign invasion–one that was not carried out by an army of soldiers but advanced by cultural programming. In the tri-border area, this competition was between Argentine and Paraguayan media, transmitting in Spanish, and Brazilian media, transmitting in Portuguese. This battle over airwaves is still ongoing: complaints that signals from more potent Brazilian antennas were interfering with Argentine radio and television broadcasts were recurrent issues debated in town council meetings during my fieldwork–a proof that in the border region questions of national identity and national security continue to be highly contested to this day.

How do journalists’ symbiotic relationships with security forces such as police and military officers affect how crime is reported?

Security forces have a strong presence in the border area and they provide a substantial amount of news material for the local media, covering a wide range of topics, from routine crime investigations to military ceremonies and parades to large-scale intelligence operations. It is a symbiotic relationship because journalists need stories (reporters are often asked to produce half a dozen news pieces per day), while security forces want good publicity of their work and readily provide the media with interviews and press releases. However, this convenient arrangement means that journalists rarely ask difficult questions, for example, regarding police impunity, corruption, and complicity with criminal actors and organizations. Usually, crime stories are authored and authorized by the security forces, with the media serving merely as the outlet for circulating the official version of events to the public. But not all towns in the tri-border area are alike. Compared to the Argentine border town of Puerto Iguazú, where local news organizations are rather weak, do not have resources or training to do investigative journalism, and cannot protect reporters if they decided to pursue such stories, some media companies in Ciudad del Este, a larger city on the Paraguayan side of the border, have done important investigations into organized crime. Nevertheless, due to corruption that entangles politicians, business owners, law enforcement, and even the media, critical crime reporting remains severely limited in the region.

Often what is illegal is still socially acceptable, and especially in your fieldsite of a border town. How did journalists engage with this tension?  Did the medium the journalist was using – text or video – affect how they negotiated this tension?

Difference between practices that are legal or illegal and legitimate or illegitimate was very important for my attempt to understand how journalists decided what became news and what information was to remain off the record, as a public secret. Socially legitimate, albeit illegal activities, such as food contraband or smuggling of fuel, were rarely covered in the media. Journalists did not report on practices in which they (or their families, or neighbors) frequently participated. Even the tools of media production–cameras, cassettes, computers–were regularly bought in Paraguay and brought across the border into Argentina illegally, avoiding taxes and other import prohibitions. On rare occasions, when illegal and socially legitimate activities became the subject of news stories, the print media had an advantage over television and even over radio. I learnt this while working on an episode about irregular adoptions and child trafficking for an investigative television program “Proximidad”: people were more willing to share what they knew when the interaction between journalists and residents did not entail the use of cameras or voice recorders.

One of the themes in your book is a running comparison between being a journalist and an ethnographer, and you managed to be both in this Argentinean border town.  You also talk a great deal about how difficult it was to move knowledge that was generally known but not openly discussed into the public sphere.   Could you discuss whether it is a different process for a journalist and for an ethnographer, and if so, how?

Anthropologists and journalists both face the challenge of making knowledge that is familiar to few available to others, but it is important to recognize that our work follows professional standards and ethics that may diverge. Journalists must protect their sources, just as ethnographers promise confidentiality and anonymity to their research participants, so from the point of view of those asking the questions and observing behavior the difference is not that obvious. Yet people who agree to disclose sensitive information, to share their private stories, see a difference between a reporter and an ethnographer. On the one hand, people are more familiar with news media as a genre of representation, and this familiarity can help build trust, although it could also undermine it–people are aware that the media sensationalizes issues. Anthropology, on the other hand, is a mystery. When I arrived to start ethnographic fieldwork, people were reluctant to talk to me about anything illegal because they did not understand what the information would be used for: Would I give it to the media, to the police, or to the government? Would the effects of making it public hurt them? With time, as research participants begin to trust the anthropologist, they are more comfortable sharing what they know. But then it is up to the anthropologist to decide what to do with this newly acquired, sometimes dangerous knowledge. Unlike journalists, who publish stories in order to draw attention to an issue, such as drug smuggling or domestic violence, in hopes that public knowledge about it would lead to changing social or political circumstances that make it possible, anthropologists often use the knowledge they gather to engage in internal theoretical debates with other scholars. This scope of our work, limited to circulating the findings within the academe, is not always clear to the people who share their lives with us, sometimes in anticipation that their knowledge could change the status quo. Of course, there are anthropologists–sometimes called engaged anthropologists or public anthropologists–who try to reach out to broader audiences, make their publications part of public debates on current issues, and push for policy changes, but this public engagement is not (or not yet) considered a defining feature of the discipline.