Tag: politics

Dog Whistles and Designer Genes

September 8th, 2025

by E. M. Elshaikh

Last month, American Eagle released an ad campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney, modeled after a 1980s Calvin Klein denim ad. The campaign plays with the homophone jeans/genes. In one version, Sweeney crosses out “genes” on a poster reading “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” replacing it with “jeans.” Another ad features her saying, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” The camera pans to her face as she says, “My jeans/genes are blue,” with no jeans in the frame.

This ad set off a fierce debate around its indeterminate meanings. As one commentator asked, “Are we supposed to want pants or Aryan features?” (Cunningham 2025). A vocal minority argued it was a dogwhistle for eugenics and white supremacy, while others insisted it was simply about Sweeney being hot. Beyond the jean/gene pun, there is also indeterminacy about which “genes” are being invoked, ostensibly her conventional attractiveness: her pouty lips, blue eyes, blonde hair, and “buxom” chest (“Hey, eyes up here!” she rebukes the camera in another ad).

The debate is animated partly by the politicized contradictions of Sweeney’s image, which is “semiotically potent and yet ideologically unfixed” (Jones 2025). Alongside acclaimed roles, Sweeney has lent her brand to numerous ad campaigns. Many of her roles hypersexualized her image, which she has alternately lamented and embraced, making her a right-wing darling as conservatives embrace “raunch” and celebrate her as an ideal female form that will end “wokeness.”

“Eugenics vibes”

For many, this ad was “fashy coded.” Some online commentators, like @Dewwwdropzz and @midtwesterngothic, called the ad Nazi propaganda, while others noted its “eugenics” or “master race” “vibes.” Right-wing commentators dismissed these interpretations as hysterical, treating accusations of Nazism as preposterous, characterizing it as “everything is Hitler” (a common right-wing refrain).

But eugenics and white supremacy was not just Hitler’s project. Trump has described immigrants as having “bad genes” and expressed preference for immigrants from blue-eyed countries; his time in office has seen expanded civil commitment for those deemed mentally ill, a massive expansion of ICE, and expanded habitual offender statutes(Cunningham 2025; Norwood 2025; Miller 2025). Trump recently federalized the California National Guard to suppress protests against deportations and took over the capital’s police to respond to “crime,” a racial dogwhistle.

These moves resonate with the rise of Christian nationalism and “great replacement” rhetoric (Ali 2025), both of which promote demographic engineering. Just weeks before the ad aired, the Department of Homeland Security amplified this vision, tweeting paintings that valorize Manifest Destiny. They were captioned: “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage” and “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Commentators suggested the capitalization itself was a dogwhistle (Ali 2025).

The MAGA-led government has also energized RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement, described as social Darwinist “soft eugenics” for withdrawing care from targeted populations and stigmatizing neurodivergence and mental illness (Beres 2025; Sexauer 2025; Giroux 2025). Coupled with the hard eugenics of the genocide of Palestinians and callous indifference to disposable lives here and elsewhere (Miller 2025; Giroux 2025), these developments mark the normalization of dehumanizing ideologies.

At the same time, other groups are encouraged to reproduce. Pronatalist movements promoted by tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, with support from the Heritage Foundation, valorize “good genes” and fuel demand for gene-edited “designer babies” (Stein 2025; Elinson 2025). Within this pronatalist, anti-choice framework, some conservatives even point to pro-choice policies and liberal institutions such as Planned Parenthood as the real eugenics.

“It’s not that deep”

This slide to fascism is perceptible, yet for many “all of this reality is stripped away” (Warzel 2025). To them, it is just an ad, just about Sweeney being hot, or just about jeans.

This dismissal is bipartisan. PragerU pundit Amala Ekpunobi ridiculed “chronically online” Leftists who should “touch grass,” insisting the ad “didn’t mean anything.” Liberal commentators likewise treated it as a distraction unworthy of “incredible complexity” and analysis (Jones 2025; Ali 2025). Some argued that engaging with the controversy benefits the right, since “the right-wing-media apparatus has every incentive to go at the Sweeneystuff, as the MAGA coalition struggles to distract its base from Donald Trump’s Epstein-files debacle” (Warzel 2025).

“Woke is dead”

If liberals were hysterical, conservatives were triumphant. While mocking liberals as snowflakes and crybabies (McIntosh 2020) and insisting “it’s not that deep,” right-wing media reanimated a MAGA battle cry (Mendoza-Denton 2020): “Woke is dead!”

When asked whether Sweeney or Beyonce won the denim war, one pundit called the ad “normal” and declared it the “final nail in the coffin” of “woke.” Fox defines woke as “progressive, politically correct stances on race, gender ideology, and other hot-button topics,” but the political correctness framing is misleading (Beliso-De Jesús 2020). Its indexical range is much broader. While White House communications director Cheung decried “Cancel culture run amok,” Cruz and Vance talked about the attack on “beautiful women.” On the Ruthless podcast, Vance quipped, “everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi,” adding “she’s a normal all-American beautiful girl doing like a normal jeans ad, right?”

Trump characteristically said the quiet part out loud, praising the ad and contrasting it with ads by Jaguar and Bud Lite. MAGA media was feeling the vibe. A Fox News pundit said, “We’re over this woke agenda. We’re over the Lizzos, we’re over the Dylan Mulvaneys. If this was a 300-pound non-binary person, they would be applauding her.” On one podcast, hosts said they were sick of “DI stuff with big girls,” wanted more “ideal images” of “perfection,” and joked there should be “legislation against plus sized models.”

Other pundits also mirrored Trump’s rhetoric with fidelity. Tomi Lahren contrasted Sweeney with Dylan Mulvaney, saying conservatives want “hot people.” Matt Walsh called the ad “a move back to normalcy” and away from “freakish nonsense.” Other pundits added: “Woke ads are out and beautiful ads are in. Yes, welcome to 2025 where Dylan Mulvaney has been replaced by Sydney Sweeney” and said:

“This seems to be simply a return to normal…they changed and they started to use hideous people…people don’t want to look like Lizzo…they want to look like Sydney Sweeney….they’ve had ugly platformed for so long…we actually aren’t all created equal…we all look different.”

A Fox commentator called the ad “consequential,” representing the demise of “fat pride and gender androgyny and DEI.” Megyn Kelly praised Sweeney as “all woman,” “natural,” and “normal,” saying she hadn’t “Kardashianized herself,” and declaring, “we are fucking done with the Lauren Sanchezes of the world” and with “enormous lips,” and rejoicing at the return to “classic American beauty.”

The blonde bombshell’s others

MAGA commentators had been celebrating Sweeney as a return to classical ideals long before the ad. When she hosted Saturday Night Live in a low-cut dress, she had already “killed woke” (Grady 2025). Commentators lamented that body positivity had brought “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack … to the brink of extinction” (Furlano 2025) and that white people had been “banished from advertising.”

In this discourse, “woke” and “DEI” index what Sweeney is not: black, big, non-binary, non-feminine, non-traditional, working as shibboleths for dispreferred social types. “DEI” itself has become a “strategically deployable shifter” (Urciuoli 2025), “relayed” into a new domain (Gal 2018) and resignified as a slur that “clasps” (Gal 2018) Sydney Sweeney to ideal images of womanhood and clasps all her opposites together as undesirable social types.


Sydney Sweeney		“DEI” “Woke”
Normal		Weird, freakish
Beautiful, hot		Ugly, hideous
Thin		Big, fat
Feminine		Androgynous
Cisgender, heterosexual		LGBTQ+
White		Non-white
Traditional, classicNatural		FuturisticUnnatural, freakish
FertileAuthenticAll-American		Childless, infertilePolitically correctForeign, diverse, mixed

The “blonde bombshell” recalls midcentury Americana, when the white feminine figure was unrivaled. Nostalgia for this time situates the campaign within a revival of regressive, white-washed femininity, from pinup girls to tradwives (Furlano 2025). Fascist movements have historically weaponized this ideal.

Sweeney’s image, combined with the ad’s images and language, draws on this charge: the paradox of white femininity as both sexualized and innocent. It enables a right-coded idealization of white, fertile, feminine beauty (Grady 2025; Cunningham 2025), set against the racial and gender diversity that unsettles a pronatalist white supremacist vision of a homogenous America.

Dogwhistles and semiotic containment

American Eagle’s campaign was a success, if only for the attention it generated. Its strategy: “Flirt with the public’s fear (or excitement) about fascism—with the help of Sydney Sweeney” (Cunningham 2025).

This flirtation plays with dual addressivity and multiple layered semiotic indeterminacies to send a dogwhistle. Dogwhistles are messages with an innocent meaning for most addressees and a coded one for some (Haney-López 2014; Slotta 2020). They are political uses of semiotic indeterminacy (Gershon 2025), and such indeterminacy is not always symmetrical (Dénigot and Burnett 2020).

Moreover, the participation framework and production format is complex (Goffman 1981). Dogwhistles are uttered by a “duplicitous speaker” who differentiates among “savvy” and non-savvy listeners (Dénigot and Burnett 2020), and this corporate ad, voiced by an actress speaking as herself but through a script, amplifies this duplicity. Even savvy listeners are multiplied: the target audience aligned with a racialized message and its liberal opponents who identify and repudiate it. Moreover, the indeterminacy here has a binary logic, with competing polarized meanings.

Racialized dogwhistles are central to conservative self-conceptions, exemplified by Lee Atwater, a pro-segregationist who directed campaigns for Reagan and Bush senior and later chaired the RNC (Haney-Lopez 2014). Atwater avoided the semiotic determinacy and rigid performativity of taboo language like the n-word (Fleming 2011; 2018; Miller 2022) by using “abstract” terms like forced busing or tax cuts, explaining that these economic policies would “hurt blacks worse than whites” while avoiding explicit slurs.

Dogwhistle tactics also use indeterminacy to differentiate within a single listener, bifurcating conscious commitments to equality from unconscious racism, so dogwhistles are hidden partly from the target audience itself (Smith 2016; Haney-Lopez 2014; Mendelberg 2001). This complicates the notion of the identity-based dogwhistle (Dénigot and Burnett 2020).

Indeed, identity here is unstable. “Woke” functions as a shifter designating not only an ideology one can adopt but also refers to groups of people who are like Lizzo, Dylan Mulvaney, or Oprah–even those who don’t adopt “woke” beliefs. Many “woke” critics of the ad were feminine white women, and many of its defenders were people of color or liberals. These “woke” identity positions don’t intersect neatly with “woke” listener positions.

In this way, a dogwhistle can hail white supremacist listeners while avowing a colorblind position (Dick and Wirtz 2011). If Sweeney’s “good genes” are about being hot rather than white or feminine, then hotness is universal, equal opportunity even. Listeners who hear racialized meanings are paranoid racebaiters, bearing the liability of racialization. Cultural value accrues to those who cannot hear it, who are figured as rational, and colorblindness enables racist discourses to proliferate under a guise of neutrality (Dick and Wirtz 2011; Williams 2020). As Haney-Lopez predicted, dogwhistle politics has evolved to recruit nonwhite support (2014). Racial identity is therefore a poor predictor of reception.

TikTok user @heyitstwig25 remarked, “So, the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad isn’t racist, but the only people I see supporting it and defending it are openly racist…got it.” This suggests the issue is less about identity than about participation in chains of discourse through which themes and cultural stories become intelligible (Slotta 2020). Names and labels work as condensed abbreviations for these stories (Ibid), and allusions or “vibes” similarly direct attention toward particular contexts–but only if those contexts are already available. Dogwhistles are one form of “strategically restricted communication,” relying on differentiated awareness of context, such as white supremacist discourse in right-wing media, without which the message is inaudible (Mendoza-Denton 2020). Further differentiation also depends on awareness of the cultural history of white supremacy, its motifs, values, and unspoken commitments. Heterogeneous audiences thus bring heterogeneous indexical associations (Agha as cited in Gershon 2025), enhancing and multiplying semiotic indeterminacy. Even defenders of the ad are heterogeneous.

This heterogeneity and indeterminacy is key to the plausible deniability that sustains racializing discourses (Dick and Wirtz 2011). By suppressing or manipulating context, speakers avoid responsibility for racist discourse and strategically differentiate their messages (Hodges 2020). This relies on ideologies of communication that privilege semantics and grammar over interactional context, common in the MAGA base and central to Trump-era tactics (Hodges 2020). Trump’s “dark innovation” has been to extend plausible deniability even further than his predecessors (Smith 2016).

The American Eagle ad exploits this affordance, building on the MAGA movement’s use of entertainment and humor as a “containment strategy,” a way to speak taboos while denying violating norms (Hall et al. 2016). The strategy also works on liberals and leftists who dismiss the ad as trivial, epiphenomenal froth atop a sea of material conditions. One LA Times critic asked why anyone cared about a silly ad when DHS was increasingly militarizing (Ali 2025). This dismissal shows how dangerous rhetoric slips by not only through semiotic indeterminacy but also because some genres render signs unserious and “not that deep.” Even the ad’s brevity functions this way. One critic wrote, “a 15-second denim commercial is not a rich enough text to sustain this level of analysis” (Jones 2025), reinforcing the idea that the micro doesn’t matter (Lempert 2024).

Does the ad even need indeterminacy? When Elon Musk can evade responsibility for a Nazi salute, with the ADL calling it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm” (Connolly 2025), plausible deniability is already abundant. Nazi salute-like gestures now circulate widely on social media. Even determinate taboo signs are rendered indeterminate through selective disavowal (Resnick 2024; 2025). A rigid designator like the swastika can be framed as “just about” something else (Resnick 2025). This “determined indeterminacy,” like colorblind discourse, naturalizes white supremacy by denying its existence (Resnick 2024). As with political dogwhistles, it enables speakers to espouse repugnant views while appearing to conform to liberal norms (Resnick 2024).

This is why American Eagle did not need to apologize. One need not be accountable for vibes. It could dismiss criticisms by insisting the ad was just “about the jeans.” Though some videos were removed, Sweeney said nothing, and the company posted only one non-apology:

This message narrowed the contextual aperture. Regardless of uptake—which both critics and supporters saw as extending beyond jeans—they affirmed meaning only in what was explicitly spoken: Sweeney’s personal “jeans” and “story.” The inclusive gesture to “everyone” nodded to the criticism while deflecting it with a universalizing message. Anyone who saw race, it implied, was seeing things that weren’t there.

This affirms a restricted meaning based only on explicit referentiality, instructing readers and viewers to ignore co-textual signs and context (Hodges 2020; Gershon 2025). Only speaker intention counts, and any further inference is cast as illusion (Gershon 2025). This form of gaslighting (Ibid) reflects a semiotic ideology of containment, empowering bad-faith speakers and listeners to dictate what something is “just” about.

Dogwhistles as canaries in coal mines

Liberal outlets such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Cut, and Vulture ran op-eds framing the controversy as misunderstanding or trivial (Andrew, Scottie et al. 2025). In this architecture of false equivalences, the dogwhistle is reduced to a failure to communicate across party lines or “read the room” (Battle 2025). Writers urged readers to “not be weird” and stop making Sweeney a proxy for broader debates, arguing that too much context is problematic and “Sometimes a pun is just a pun” (Jones 2025). Others lamented that “the discourse is broken,” with both sides only discharging outrage (Warzel 2025). Many blamed the Internet or social media for polarization.

The “discourse” is indeed shaped by algorithmic media that mines attention through ragebait and infinite scrolls. But the Internet did not break the discourse. Racist dogwhistles long predate it; there has never been a good faith bipartisan conversation (Slotta 2020). Reasoned dialogue with white supremacists is neither desirable nor possible. The metadiscourse is broken too: if bad-faith speakers mobilize semiotic ideologies of containment, then talking past one another is not a failure but an achievement. And semiotic containment will only increasingly normalize dangerous rhetoric and admit it into respectable discourse.

This dynamic extends beyond the American Eagle ad, which condenses broader cultural movements. A “leftist meltdown” is overstated; most leftists didn’t care. MAGA media amplified faint signals (Warzel 2025) to occasion the celebration of the death of “woke” and rebirth of “normal.” The same pattern followed Dylan Mulvaney (Holmes 2025).

A select few spoke of dogwhistles, others of canaries in coal mines. On Breaking Points, the host read the ad as carrying white supremacist and eugenicist overtones; the guest scoffed, calling it “just an ad, not a canary in the coal mine for the rise of fascism.” Others insisted it was exactly that: for critical savvy listeners,it was an early warning of danger.

A “canary in a coal mine” once referred to bringing canaries underground to warn of toxic gases. As a metaphor, it’s a signal of imminent threat. Yet the canary is not a signal but a sensitive receiver, like a savvy listener who can reconstruct the discursive milieu and anticipate construals.

Listening is political work. The pragmatics of reception, who listens, to whom, how, and why (Slotta 2023), are further complicated by algorithmic mediation which creates micro-publics. As linguistic anthropologists, we cultivate sensitive listening within and beyond field sites and across publics. So when we hear the cry “woke is dead!” as the military-industrial complex ramps up domestically and abroad, we should continue to ask what that cry presupposes and entails. Such listening may provide early warnings or perhaps reminders of dangers long present.

References

Ali, Lorraine. 2025. “Commentary: Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans Pun Is Not a ‘Nazi Dog Whistle,’ but That DHS Campaign? It Might Be.” Los Angeles Times, August 1. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-08-01/ad-with-sydney-sweeney-not-nazi-propaganda-dhs-campaign.

Andrew, Scottie, Leah Asmelash, and Harmeet Kaur. 2025. “What Did We Learn from the Sydney Sweeney Jeans Drama?” CNN, August 4. https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/02/entertainment/sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-ad-dunkin-drama-cec.

Battle, Olivia Craighead, and Hanna Flanagan, Grey. 2025. “Why Is Everyone Up in Arms About Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans Ads?” The Cut, August 4. https://www.thecut.com/article/new-sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-ad-controversy-explained.html

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M. 2020. “The Jungle Academy: Molding White Supremacy in American Police Recruits.” American Anthropologist 122 (1): 143–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13357.

Beres, Derek. 2025. “Maga’s Era of ‘Soft Eugenics’: Let the Weak Get Sick, Help the Clever Breed.” The Guardian, May 4. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/may/04/maga-soft-eugenics.

Connolly, Kate. 2025. “‘The Gesture Speaks for Itself’: Germans Respond to Musk’s Apparent Nazi Salute.” The Guardian, January 21. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/21/the-gesture-speaks-for-itself-germans-divided-over-musks-apparent-nazi-salute.

Cunningham, Kyndall. 2025. “Wow, That Sydney Sweeney Jeans Ad Sure Got People Talking.” Vox, August 4. https://www.vox.com/culture/422121/sydney-sweeneys-american-eagle-ad-jeans-genes-eugenics-trump.

Dénigot, Quentin, and Heather Burnett. 2020. “Dogwhistles as Identity-Based Interpretative Variation.” Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference.

Dick, Hilary Parsons, and Kristina Wirtz. 2011. “Racializing Discourses.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21 (s1): E2–10.

Elinson, Zusha. 2025. “Inside Silicon Valley’s Growing Obsession With Having Smarter Babies.” Wall Street Journal, August 26. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/silicon-valley-high-iq-children-764234f8.

Fleming, Luke. 2011. “Name Taboos and Rigid Performativity.” Anthropological Quarterly 84 (1): 141–65.

———. 2018. “Undecontextualizable: Performativity and the Conditions of Possibility of Linguistic Symbolism.” Signs and Society 6 (3): 558–606.

Furlano, Meaghan. 2025. “Why Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Campaign Is Part of a Wider Cultural Backlash.” The Conversation, August 6. http://theconversation.com/why-sydney-sweeneys-american-eagle-campaign-is-part-of-a-wider-cultural-backlash-262417.

Gal, Susan, and Judith T. Irvine. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gershon, Ilana. 2025. “The Political Uses of Semiotic Indeterminacy.” Signs and Society 13 (1): 1–8.

Giroux, Henry. 2025. “Tears of Blood: Eugenics, Disposability, and the War on Children.” CounterPunch, May 23. https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/23/tears-of-blood-eugenics-disposability-and-the-war-on-children/.

Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Grady, Constance. 2025. “Sydney Sweeney and the Unsettling Legacy of the Blonde Bombshell.” Vox, August 5. https://www.vox.com/culture/422366/sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-jeans-ad-controversy-blonde-bombshell.

Hall, Kira, Donna M. Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram. 2016. “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 71–100.

Haney-López, Ian. 2014. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hodges, Adam. 2020. “Plausible Deniability.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.009.

Holmes, Dave. 2025. “Liberals Are the Hysterical Ones?” Esquire, August 6. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a65605802/sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-ad-reaction/.

Jones, Nate. 2025. “Can We Not Be Weird About Sydney Sweeney for 5 Seconds?” Vulture, August 5. https://www.vulture.com/article/can-we-be-not-be-weird-about-sydney-sweeney-for-5-seconds.html.

Lempert, Michael. 2024. From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McIntosh, Janet. 2020. “Crybabies and Snowflakes.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.005.

Mendelberg, Tali. 2001. The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2020. “Part I Introduction: ‘Ask the Gays’: How to Use Language to Fragment and Redefine the Public Sphere.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.002.

Miller, Laura. 2022. “Bad Mouths: Taboo and Transgressive Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology 51: 17–30. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041420-112543.

Miller, Leeja, dir. 2025. The Eugenics of It All. YouTube video, 33:04. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNSkjm4ETrU.

Norwood, Candice. 2025. “It’s Not Just ‘Good Genes.’ It’s a Dark Reminder of History.” The 19th, August 4. https://19thnews.org/2025/08/american-eagle-good-genes-ad-history-eugenics/.

Resnick, Elana. 2024. “The Determined Indeterminacy of White Supremacy.” American Ethnologist 51 (3): 433–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13311.

———. 2025. “Absurdities of Indeterminacy: Swastikas and Playing with the Token-Type Relationship.” Signs and Society 13 (1): 60–77. https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2024.8.

Sexauer, Joe. 2025. “‘Make America Healthy Again’ Aims to Make Public Health Your Private Responsibility.” Truthout, May 29. https://truthout.org/articles/make-america-healthy-again-aims-to-make-public-health-your-responsibility/.

Slotta, James. 2020. “The Significance of Trump’s Incoherence.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.003.

———. 2023. Anarchy and the Art of Listening: The Politics and Pragmatics of Reception in Papua New Guinea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501770029.

Smith, Chris A. 2016. “Coded and Loaded: How Politicians Talk About Race and Gender Without Really Talking About Race and Gender.” California Magazine, September 20. https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/fall-2016-the-greatest-show-on-earth/coded-and-loaded-how-politicians-talk-about-race/.

Stein, Rob. 2025. “The Quest to Create Gene-Edited Babies Gets a Reboot.” NPR, August 6. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/08/06/nx-s1-5493448/gene-editing-human-embryos-designer-babies.

Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2025. “Revisiting the Strategically Deployable Shifter: Manipulating Indeterminacy for Semiotic Power and Profit.” Signs and Society 13 (1): 9–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2024.3.

Walsh, Kathleen. 2025. “The Sydney Sweeney American Eagle Controversy Just Got Even More Politicized.” Glamour, July 28. https://www.glamour.com/story/why-is-the-sydney-sweeney-great-jeans-american-eagle-ad-causing-a-social-media-firestorm.

Warzel, Charlie. 2025. “The Discourse Is Broken.” The Atlantic, July 30. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-ads/683704/.

Mark LeVine on his book Heavy Metal Islam

May 6th, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 20th, 2023

Cornell University Press

Ilana Gershon: What does focusing on listening and ideologies of listening among people living in Yopno Valley in Papua New Guinea allow you to examine? What assumptions do you have to disrupt?

James Slotta: The study of political speech has a long and venerable history, going back at least to Plato. Rhetoricians, philosophers, anthropologists, communications scholars and others have all probed the role that speech and speaking play in political life: the power of words to influence and affect others, the importance of voice as a tool of politics, the role of public discourse in democratic politics, and much else besides.

I myself went to Papua New Guinea to study political oratory, a topic that has attracted a fair amount of interest among anthropologists. But right from the start of my research, I was struck by how ineffective the oratory I had gone to study was. Community leaders would make public speeches announcing a community meeting or some construction work to be done on the community school, and I would show up at the appointed hour to find only a few people there. We would sit around for a bit, waiting to see if others would come, and then give up and go our separate ways.

Needless to say, this did not seem like a very auspicious context to study political oratory and the power of words. But it helped me to appreciate something that other ethnographers of Melanesia—Bambi Schieffelin, Don Kulick, Joel Robbins, Lise Dobrin, Rupert Stasch—have remarked on: in the region, it is often listeners who are regarded as the powerful and important figures in communicative events. As I was discovering, that’s because they are!

In the literature on political communication, listening doesn’t often figure as an activity of much importance, perhaps because it is typically associated with passivity and submission. But in the Yopno Valley, people are attuned to the power and consequentiality of listening. Every time community members failed to heed an announcement, it was a reminder of the power of listeners—and a reminder of the impotence of speeches and the would-be leaders who made them. As we sat around waiting to see if others would show up for a meeting or a community work project, talk inevitably turned to why others weren’t coming. And that often focused on listening—how people should listen, why they should listen, and especially how they don’t listen.

So, I started to pay attention to norms and practices of listening in Yopno villages—how people think about it, talk about it, and do it. That gradually revealed what a complicated and fraught activity listening was for people. It also became clear that many of the listening practices involved in local village politics were also part of people’s dealings with actors and institutions from outside the valley: missionaries, government officials, environmental conservation NGOs, anthropologists, and so on. Listening became an important lens not only for understanding village politics, but for understanding colonialism, globalization, and missionization in the region.

Ilana Gershon: What is your approach for studying different ways of listening?

James: Listening is difficult to study because, unlike speaking, it doesn’t leave an immediate trace. Perhaps that’s one reason speech and speaking have received so much more attention from scholars of political communication. But people’s listening practices do leave their mark. For one, they can be glimpsed in the way people talk about listening. In the Yopno Valley, people talk a lot about listening and there are characteristic ways of talking about it—a kind of lexicon of listening—that shed light on local ideologies and norms of listening. There is also much effort made to explicitly advise and instruct people on how to listen, which puts this lexicon to use in illuminating ways.

Different practices of listening are also evident in the ways people respond to others’ speech. When few people show up for community meetings, that’s a clue to how people are listening to the speeches of community leaders. In my research, verbal responses proved to be a particularly important resource for looking at how people listen. Community meetings are important political events in Yopno villages, and much of what people do there is talk over other people’s proposals. In this talk about others’ talk, we get a palpable indication of how people are listening and a public performance of a kind of listening that is central to the politics of Yopno villages.

Finally, I focus a lot on the kinds of speech that people want to listen to. Early in my research, I was often asked to speak at public events, which made me pretty uncomfortable. As I saw it, I was there to listen, not to give advice and make speeches. My ethnographic desire to listen, you might say, blinded me to my interlocutors’ desire to listen. Eventually, as it became clear that listening was an activity worth attending to, I started thinking about why people wanted me to speak and what kind of speech they wanted from me. And I could see that often what they wanted me to talk about echoed the kind of speech that people in Yopno villages are often looking for from each other—namely, expert advice. Why is that the sort of thing listeners in Yopno villages seek out? Working out the answer to that question helped me understand why listening is such an important part of Yopno political life.

So, even though this book is about listening, it is filled with speech! Speech about listening, speech about speech, and speech that people listen to.

Ilana Gershon: Why do you call the listening practiced by people in Yopno Valley anarchic?

James: As in many rural parts of Papua New Guinea, political life in Yopno villages is largely anarchic in character. I mean this in the etymological sense: it is a political environment without rulers, without people or institutions with the power to issue commands, adjudicate disputes, or enforce laws. Community leaders do not have the means to coerce people to act, nor is the Papua New Guinean state really able to do so in this out-of-the-way region.

The book focuses on the critical role that listening plays in sustaining this anarchic political environment. For instance, ignoring the public speeches of community leaders is a way listeners subvert the authority of would-be rulers. But other listening practices also play a part. To organize community activities consensually, without a leader calling the shots, requires a different sort of listening.

Of course, listening is important in other domains of Yopno life as well. I concentrate on anarchic listening in the book because listening plays such a visible and vital role in Yopno political life.

Ilana Gershon: Telling others what to do appears to be a highly charged speech act for people living in Yopno Valley. Why do you think it is so highly charged, and what social strategies develop as a result?

James: Telling others what to do cuts right at the heart of the anarchic, egalitarian ethos of Yopno political life. Adults, particularly men, value their self-determination and they guard it closely.

But it is important to specify the limits of this. First off, telling others what to do is not universally disapproved of. People are constantly telling children what to do and have no qualms about doing so. To an extent, husbands boss their wives around without compunction, though they often get pushback if they go too far. As Michelle Rosaldo says of Ilongot households, directives might be the paradigmatic act of speech within Yopno kin groups. Concerns about self-determination and equality really come into force in dealings among adults, especially those without kin ties to one another.

Secondly, the kind of egalitarianism one finds in the Yopno Valley and many other parts of New Guinea is what James Woodburn termed “competitive egalitarianism.” Equality among people is not presumed; it must constantly be proven. So, people must be careful to ensure they are not being pushed around, even as they are often trying to get the better of others. As Anthony Forge noted, in New Guinea “to be equal and stay equal is an extremely onerous task requiring continual vigilance and effort.”

The result is that those men who try to verbally direct other men in the community must be very very careful. Historically, community leaders tended to die young, the targets of occult violence from angry community members pushed too far. Today, with the advent of Christianity, sorcery and witchcraft are less common. Leaders may feel less besieged, but now they too don’t have recourse to threats of sorcery, which were one of the key tools leaders in the past used to get people to listen to them.

At the time of my research, efforts to direct others often involved the communication of expertise, which is a fascinating and seemingly contradictory speech act. Leaders share their purported expertise with listeners as a way to steer their actions. At the same time, listeners seek out this expert knowledge as a way to empower themselves. In other words, the communication of expertise is a way leaders attempt to exert power over listeners while enhancing listeners’ self-determination. Such a seemingly contradictory speech act is a fitting instrument for those who play the seemingly contradictory role of leaders of anarchic communities.

Ilana Gershon: What role does repetition play in Yopno Valley communicative life?

James: Repetition is a ubiquitous part of verbal life. In community meetings, the same issues are discussed and the same points made week after week. Community leaders make announcements and when no one listens they make the same announcements again. As people step out of church on Sunday, church leaders launch into a summary of the sermon everyone just heard. And throughout all of this, speakers comment on how repetitious they are being.

There are a variety of reasons for all this repetition, a primary one being that speakers assume listeners are ignoring them. They repeat themselves in the hopes that eventually their message will get through. People are attuned to how listeners listen and they fashion their speech accordingly. Repetition is one very visible result. The communication of expertise is another. Norms and ideologies of listening are part of an ecology of communication and so they shape the ways people speak. The upshot is that any analysis of speech—from research on speech registers and genres to the analysis of conversations and texts—really needs to attend to the way participants think about and go about listening.
Amahl Bishara discusses her book, Crossing a Line

March 13th, 2023

Interview by Sarah Ihmoud

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34196

Sarah Ihmoud: Crossing a Line offers a refreshing and indeed critical ethnographic approach to understanding Palestinian political expression across the fragmented social landscapes imposed by Israeli settler colonialism. How does bringing more than one distinct Palestinian geography into the analytical frame—in this context, Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and those subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank—reorient our understanding of the Palestinian present? What does this methodological approach enable us to grasp, both in terms of the performance of settler colonial violence and the performance of indigenous identities and sovereignties?

Amahl Bishara: First, Sarah, I want to say thank you for this chance to be in conversation! You’ve been a crucial interlocutor for so long. The long-dominant frame of “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” located the Palestinian national struggle primarily in the occupied territories and saw discrimination against Palestinians in Israel as a minor issue. This view serves both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel portrays the issue as being about security, confronting an external enemy. The Palestinian Authority, nominally in charge of the occupied territories, uses this frame to claim power and legitimacy there.

Reframing the boundaries of political discussion demonstrates how Israel’s settler colonial project is and has been unified across all historic Palestine. Looking at these two Palestinian geographies together exposes how Israel’s systems of separation multiply repression for all Palestinians. More generally, the approach moves us beyond state-centered definitions of politics, challenging methodological nationalism.

Given that Israel has controlled the West Bank since 1967, its crucial to ask: what sustains the conception, even among Palestinians, that the West Bank and Israel’s 1948 territories are separate from each other? We know that a vast system of checkpoints, walls, and other forms of closure suffocates Palestinian economies, but I show also that this system limits Palestinian politics—preventing joint protests, for example. Separation is also maintained through media, including in Palestinian news. I look at what constitutes “local” or “Palestinian” news for Palestinians in different locations. Meanwhile, in ways both mundane and spectacular, the Palestinian Authority represses dissent and ossifies the fragmentation Israel instigated. An anthropology for liberation must be ready to both confront settler colonial violence and also take on cooptation of older paths toward liberation.

Sarah Ihmoud:Another important contribution of your book is the invitation to think with what you call Palestinians’ “political habitus”, or the embodied sense of how Palestinians perform political practice, as well as their “structures of feelings, affective orientations to the political world that are in the process of taking shape” (5) in distinct yet interrelated environments. Why is it imperative that we examine the conditions of political communication among Palestinians not only through the content of their expression, but also through the affective and intimate aspects of that expression?

Amahl Bishara: Activist Palestinians on two sides of the Green Line will agree on many foundational principles of Palestinian liberation, even as they are aware that living under Israeli sovereignty in each location presents them with different challenges. Yet, without ethnography it can be difficult to appreciate the ways in which those everyday dynamics shape political action. An Arabic-English language t-shirt that called for “one vote for each Palestinian everywhere” felt ordinary to wear in Bethlehem in the West Bank but made people uncomfortable in Jaffa near Tel Aviv during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. People had different reactions to stun grenades and the threat of tear gas. Also that summer I was amazed by the bravery of Palestinian protesters on two sides of the Green Line as they refused the violence of Israel’s war—but the forms the bravery took were quite different: protesters performed chants that speak to generations of Palestinian resistance inside Israel’s 1948 territories, whereas those in the occupied territories engaged in direct confrontation, throwing stones at the Israeli army in Palestinian cities and neighborhoods.

I start the book reflecting on a post-protest riff by the wonderful singer Walaa’ Sbeit, of the band 47Soul, in which he says, basically, “let’s be kind to those who left”—that is the refugees—”and kind to those who stayed”—the citizens of Israel. This addresses tensions that have existed among Palestinian communities. Israeli citizenship gives Palestinians mobility, and a level of social services. Being in the West Bank entails vulnerability to many forms of violence, but also places Palestinians there at the forefront of the Palestinian story on the world stage. It might be tempting to talk in terms of privileges, but here every privilege is also a restraint of a sort. I hope that bringing together these embodied ways of being also helps us to be as generous as possible toward people in all of these positions, as Walaa Sbeit summons us to do.

Sarah Ihmoud: You describe movement between and across borders as an important epistemic experience. In one section of the book, you note that geopolitical fragmentation and immobility are a means of eliminating Indigenous collectives. Yet, Palestinians diagnose and contest settler colonialism in and through transit. Moving us back and forth across the Green Line, your ethnography itself performs a sort of mobility that defies the geopolitical fragmentation of Israeli settler colonialism. In reading your book, I was struck by the ethnographic “passages” between chapters that give us a sense of the embodied and affective experience of crossing militarized borders and geographies as a Palestinian researcher. Can you talk about your decision to include these passages? How might writing from the embodied space of crossing borders enable a more ethical anthropological engagement in Palestine?

Amahl Bishara: To be on the road is to be in direct contact with the state: a road may be smooth or bumpy, safe or unsafe, direct or indirect. We encounter soldiers and police officers. To be on the road is to be in a social relationship with other passengers and even with those in other cars. To be on the road is also an affectively rich experience. The road tunes the senses, ripe with possibilities of danger, frustration, and pleasure—sometimes all at once.

If I’m interested in the kinds of fleeting collectives that might be seeds for liberation, that challenge today’s political order, what better places to explore than a bus ride for a rare children’s trip to the beach, the first time most of these young refugees have crossed the Green Line into Israel’s 1948 territories and the first time they have passed through the villages from which their families were dispossessed? Or a bus ride during which strangers have to decide how to handle soldiers’ exercise of their petty sovereignty over who will be allowed to stay on the bus?

Writing about my own mobility is a also way of recognizing the advantage with which I approach this project as a person with US and Israeli passports that give me the ability to move across the Green Line. I could go places some of my dearest friends and family members could not. Honestly, this made it very important for me to make my trips worthwhile. Likewise, in one of the passages I write about some travel that broke Israel’s apartheid laws. Maybe this is essential too.

Sarah Ihmoud: In exploring various practices on both sides of the Green Line—among them protest, commemoration, mourning and care work—you bring to the fore the paradoxical ways in which Palestinians subject to the most extreme forms of constraint are able to create space for intimacy, kinship and socialities to emerge. For example, the space of the colonial prison, while a profound site of violence, is simultaneously a space of profound connection among Palestinians across the green line. What possibilities do these emergent intimacies offer in reimagining Palestine and Palestinian liberation beyond the nation state?

Amahl Bishara: Nationalism often legitimizes state violence in the name of horizontal kinship. It can be an abstract kind of “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson wrote those many years ago. But when people focus on concrete acts of care and nurturing, this can open them up to new dimensions of experience and help us imagine new forms of relationality. Prison confines and violates thousands today and threatens many thousands more. Yet, Palestinians have also shown that caring acts in prison and caring for prisoners can draw people together. For example, it can train attention to intrepid activists, like those on hunger strikes against administrative detention, which is Israel’s policy of imprisonment without charge, and it can create relations that challenge settler colonial policies of fragmentation.

When Palestinians make an effort to nurture creative and curious connections with each other that challenge settler colonial lines of division—not only across the walls of prison, and not only between Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the West Bank, but also among Palestinians in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Detroit, and Chile—new visions of liberation can emerge. These visions will recognize the toll of the ongoing Nakba; they will stand against violence against women, like the Tal’at movement; they will treasure the village home as well as urban spaces. At a time when the official Palestinian nationalist movement is so hollow and repressive, this is urgently needed.

Sarah Ihmoud: While Crossing a Line is deeply situated in the Palestinian experience, your analysis names the interconnection between state violence against Black and Indigenous communities in Palestine, North America, Kashmir and beyond through the connective tissue of global racism and militarism that have taken shape through distinct settler colonial formations. Beyond the Palestinian context, what is the broader invitation of your ethnography? What does the space of Palestine offer us in thinking between and across colonial and racial projects that give rise to state violence across the globe? What does it offer us in thinking generatively about solidarities and possibilities for decolonial futures?

Amahl Bishara: Throughout the process of writing this book, I have been living and working in the Boston area. Of course there are important connections between the US and Israel as two militarized settler colonies. I’ve commemorated the ongoing Nakba of Indigenous dispossession here through the National Day of Mourning. I’ve thought about how the Black Lives Matter movement faces different threats in Baltimore, Maryland than it does in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because in the former, many more protesters are Black. We can’t be responsible participants in these movements without recognizing differences in privilege afforded by social location and geography.

Settler colonialisms and militarisms create certain subject positions, but they do not define people or movements. Whether one is studying Kashmir, Sioux territory, the Uyghur homeland, or Palestine, I hope this book is an invitation to think comparatively and connectively in a way that also rigorously attends to local practices, to embodied experiences and unfolding histories of protest. I hope it is an invitation to think in ways that challenge statist definitions of place and liberation and to bring places into relation in generative and even generous ways.
Mwenda Ntarangwi on his book, The Street is My Pulpit

January 24th, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mwenda Ntarangwi: For Juliani, society is not fully free until everyone has a chance to follow through with their dreams. He believes that such freedom does not come from political benevolence but that it must be constructed and demanded by the electorate. Making the right choices at the ballot box and holding leaders accountable is an important step towards achieving the kind of society Kenyans need. Juliani is also clear that no one will be given free stuff and each one has to work for the things he/she has. He believes that the youth have an opportunity to change their circumstances through honest hard work supported by the right economic and political structures. This belief is what propelled his song and movement he termed “Kama Si Sisi (if not us)” which is about the youth taking on leadership and owning property today (not tomorrow, as is the common idea that youth are leaders of tomorrow). This kind of hope is not far-fetched because, as I show in my other book on East African Hip Hop, many of the businesses revolving around popular music within East Africa were run and owned by young people. The kind of politics that Juliani espouses through his music (the politics of radical faith) has not quite caught on among many Kenyans because of the enduring assumption that politics and faith are like water and oil, they do not mix. It will take a few more years of consistently breaking such assumptions and norms to get the masses to see the value of using faith to engage with the politics of the day. But given the culture of deceit corruption and outright mudslinging, it is difficult for a Christian to be engaged in fruitful politics in Kenya today. As they say, culture will eat strategy for lunch. Unless the political culture changes to accommodate people of Christian faith, there still will be spaces where Christians will feel like outsiders in politics.
Justin Richland on his book, Cooperation without Submission

December 6th, 2021

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo34191322.html

Interview by Hannah McElGunn

Hannah McElGunn: Cooperation Without Submission brings together cases drawn from a wide range of contexts including the US tax code, Hopi Tribal consultation engagements with the US Forest Service, and a hearing between an anonymized Tribal nation and the US Office of Federal Acknowledgement. What was the process like of piecing together the different elements of this book?

Justin Richland: Is happenstance a process? I am only half serious…but I am half. I agree with Marilyn Strathern when she argues that ethnography involves the purposeful effort to generate more data than one is cognizant of at the time one is in the field. This seems to me consistent with most anthropologists’ commitment to a kind of humanistic empiricism; to not decide in advance what data are relevant to our hypotheses, but rather to have one’s own claims be open to the observable acts and interpretations of the people with whom we engage, wherever they may lead. And so, happenstance always plays a role.

In this case, it was a combination of happenstance but also a terrible creative block that led me to the final formation of this book. I struggled with settling on a second project, even as I was taking on projects that involved different elements of Tribal governance and often involved different Tribal nations and national organizations. I was involved in a lot of important efforts by Native Nation advocates to influence US law and policy, but none to which I felt I could give the singular attention they deserved.

Then, in 2016, the #NoDAPL/Mni Wiconi protest the Dakota Access pipeline construction across Standing Rock Sioux Nation’s territory exploded in the news. I followed the confrontations between protesters, police and private security forces. But I also learned that the confrontations erupted when an ongoing legal battle had boiled over after a US court denied the Standing Rock Nation’s injunction to stop a federal agency from issuing a permit to complete construction. The Nation had sought the injunction because, they contended, the agency had failed to follow laws requiring meaningful Tribal consultation before issuing its permit. The U.S. countered that Tribal Nations had been consulted over a hundred times. It was this conflict that resonated with something I had experienced in my own work, and a sentiment that I had heard over and over from my Indigenous colleagues. They complained that while agency officials were often ready to hold so-called listening sessions with them, it was almost always the case that Native advocates left those meetings feeling like their concerns weren’t heard or otherwise meaningfully engaged. At the same time, despite this repeated refrain of frustration, I also learned, that many Native Nation representatives entered these meetings expecting to have their aims frustrated. And yet they undertook them anyway. This is what interested me most, and it led me to think about how Native Nation-US engagements might reflect an enduring Indigenous stance in which insisting on taking these meetings were acts of self-determination in the face of settler colonization that defied easy explanation along binaries of resistance/complicity.

It was while working through this that I recalled the words of my Hopi mentor Emory Sekaquaptewa, who once said, “In Hopi, culture teaches us cooperation without submission.” I wondered if the Native leaders’ engagements with non-native agencies and institutions are, refusals to capitulate to US settler colonialism, but enacted in a mode of provisional cooperation, rather than overt resistance. It is this possibility I explore in the book.

Hannah McElGunn: At several points in Cooperation Without Submission, you detail the way in which the United States and its agents approach Tribal norms, knowledge, and practices as objects to be evaluated or judged rather than logics of a sovereign governance system. But you also bring up a parallel distinction early on when discussing your own positionality, noting that you “deploy an Indigenous theory of sociopolitical action not as an object of analysis but as the analytic framework itself” (23). How did you seek to do this? Were there moments when the distinction felt slippery or difficult to enact?

Justin Richland: The conceit of this book is that to begin to grasp how Native Nations navigate the inherent contradictions of insisting on their sovereignty while also doing the everyday work of self-governance under conditions of settler colonialism, it necessitates taking Native actors literally at their word. That is, we ought to not only begin our analyses with the normative insights and perspectives that Native Nation officials take to their meetings with their US counterparts, but also how those norms are shaped by and shaping the unfolding interactions and institutions through which these meetings are accomplished. Only by asking after what parties to these engagements are up to when they undertake them, and the consequences (both interactionally and sociostructurally) they seem to anticipate emanating from them, can we start to get at an analysis of the Native Nation – US relations that start from the norms, knowledge and relations that Indigenous actors bring to them. In the book (and elsewhere) I have called these effects of political and legal speech activity, Indigenous juris-dictions, because I want to foreground how authority is announced and announced as enduring, in the details of rather mundane institutional discourses that seem to be about other things entirely.

We can then layer on to Indigenous juris-dictions the fact that this regulatory regime of meaningful Tribal consultation is claimed to be at the heart of official government-to-government relationships between Native Nations and the US, and the question of the meaning of “meaningful” for Native Nations party to these engagements is not just a matter of academic interest, but foundational legal consequence. Heeding the words of my Indigenous colleagues, I argue that meaningful Tribal consultation thus requires something beyond dialogue; it is a mode of engagement that is more than a “listening session.” Namely it requires engagement that takes Indigenous norms, knowledge and relations not as the data for regulatory actors to weigh, but as the measuring sticks against which regulatory decisions impacting Native interests are to be judged. This seems to be the meaning that Native actors are bringing to these consultations. Alas, too often this is not what their non-native counterparts understand these meetings to consist in, and the results are the frustrations I describe above.

You ask if this was a slippery or difficult distinction sometimes. Yes, of course, largely because writing in the usual genres of anthropological and sociolegal scholarship tracks with the same evaluative logics used by the US officials who see consultations as information gathering events, rather than as acts of governmental co-management. And so the descriptions made in this book involved normative judgments on my part, ones that treat Indigenous normativity, epistemology and relationality as objects of my inquiry. I try to foreground this inherent problem by insisting that my descriptions are necessarily imperfect, and thus open for reinterpretation by the Native people whose actions I was representing. Hopefully then the claims in this book are seen as provisional and thus always pointing beyond themselves to the ways in which Native Nations and their actors are themselves bringing their words to bear on the world.

Hannah McElGunn: Your thinking about limits, refusal, and recognition draws on work by Glen Coulthard and Audra Simpson, but also departs from it, especially from a methodological point of view. What do you think a linguistic anthropological approach can add to the wider discussion of these issues?

Justin Richland: Limits, refusal and the problems of recognition are central to the ways in which I am understanding how Native actors engage their non-native counterparts in US agencies and institutions funded by them. And I am indebted to the tremendously influential work of Simpson, Coulthard, and many others (including Jodi Byrd, Vine and Phil Deloria, Scott Lyons, Gerald Vizenor among others) for helping me think through how cooperation without submission could be understood in terms of refusal and problems of recognition. Standing on their shoulders has allowed me to see how refusal and recognition emerge in the details of the interactions and texts that constitute them, but in surprising and often seemingly contradictory ways. It is precisely there, methodologically, I think that linguistic anthropology gives me some purchase for understanding how engagements that might on their face seem capitulatory, are also, simultaneously, meaningful acts of push back, refusal, or limit. Linguistic anthropological methods and theories, and in particular our commitments to understanding the situated meaning of speech activity and textual forms in the details of their actual accomplishment, gives us a way of understanding how, despite (or maybe because of) the constraints imposed by certain structures of interaction and social action, social actors are nonetheless able to produce meanings and make claims that have powerful, multivalent effects, some that even have a relation of irony to each other. Thus a Hopi leader engaging US officials can in one moment refuse to share with them a sacred item of considerable esoteric significance to him and the other Hopi in the room, but then moments later reverse course, and freely pass the item around. Only by reflecting on their discursive and semiotic accomplishment can we begin to appreciate how this sequence of actions – rather than signs of hesitation or a caving to settler colonial expectations – are significant performances of Hopi political authority, and, at the same time, enactments of cultural knowledge, normative responsibilities and the inauguration of relations now interpolating the US officials with whom the object was shared. Without understanding the semiotics of these kind of actions, and the pragmatic details by which they emerge in real time, the way these acts are simultaneously signs of accommodation and coordination, can also be acts of refusal, and limit. It is this I am calling Indigenous juris-dictions of “cooperation without submission.”

Hannah McElGunn: I found some of the most interesting nuggets in this book to be the historical discursive contexts you provided for terms that have become familiar to anthropologists working with Indigenous communities who engage with the US government. I’m thinking in particular of the discursive gymnastics around Chief Justice John Marshall’s term “domestic dependent nations” that you detail in chapter two. Did you come across any surprising, unexpected, or overlooked historical details in your research for this book that have stuck with you?

Justin Richland: I’m not sure if this answers your question, but perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the work I do is recognizing how ignorant most non-natives (including me) still are about everyday Indigenous life in the US and elsewhere. The challenges posed by misrepresentations of Native peoples in our public culture are not just that they are inherently racist, or otherwise hurtful, which they certainly are. To me, what is also bad is just how much they make actual Native Nations and their lives utterly unrecognizable. So, when I was thinking about how to answer your question, my first reaction was to say how pleasantly surprising it was to me to find so many examples of Indigenous leaders responding to US settler colonial policies and laws with an enormous degree of political savvy. But then, almost immediately, I felt ashamed because one would think that after nearly three decades of working with Native Nations and their advocates, I would have gained an appreciation for the ways in which Indigenous political agency is so often overlooked in studies of Native-US relations, past and present. And yet, here I am, surprised to find out that Quanah Parker and Lone Wolf had already gone to Washington D.C. and spoke with federal officials there who warned them of what the Jerome Commission was after. Likewise, why was I surprised to find out that Cherokee leaders had hired some of the best legal minds of the day in their effort to stop Georgia from unilaterally imposing its laws on them, and even solicited the assistance of non-native allies to subject themselves to Georgia incarceration so that Chief Justice Marshall would have two different kinds of legal controversies with which to articulate the government-to-government relations between the Cherokee, Georgia and the federal government. This is all incredibly skilled legal and political maneuvering, stuff that I have seen often in my current work with Native Nations, but which is still surprising to me when I uncover it historically. And this is what makes me ashamed. I am still surprised, I think, because I continue to labor under misconceptions of Indigenous political naivete and susceptibility to US double dealing that emanate from the prejudicial and racialized views of Indigenous history that are so deeply engrained in how we learn about Native – US relations. And if someone like me, who has had the honor of working so closely with Native Nation leaders and advocates for so long, still can’t seem to throw off these misconceptions, what must it be like for others who have not had my good fortune? I fear there is still a lot of work to do to correct these enduring misunderstandings. I only hope that Cooperation Without Submission is one more small step in rectifying the norms, knowledge, and relations with which we non-natives engage Native Nations and their citizens.
Lauren Zentz on her book, Narrating Stance, Morality, and Political Identity

July 12th, 2021

Interview by Özge Korkmaz

https://www.routledge.com/Narrating-Stance-Morality-and-Political-Identity-Building-a-Movement/Zentz/p/book/9780367776411

Özge Korkmaz: I want to start with a general question. How would you describe this book to an anthropological audience, and do you see it as belonging to any particular theoretical genealogy or subfield?

Lauren Zentz: I must say that I have always seen myself as a theoretical nomad of sorts. That being said, I find that linguistic anthropology and especially sociolinguistics are good homes for such a type of scholar. I believe that I can say that my work is inspired by work that comes from various fields but that tends toward the ethnographic. Thus in this book, as I relay in the preface, I draw on diverse work ranging from the feminist qualitative studies of Lather and Smithies, to Mendoza-Denton’s and Heller’s crucial work that I tend to consider more typical for the field of linguistic anthropology; I draw on ethnographic work that is not really described as such from foremost political scientists like Theda Skocpol; ethnographic work that draws more on cultural anthropological writing paradigms in Graeber’s work; to work that blends genres, like Perry Gilmore’s ethnography-slash-memoir that also taps into long-held conversations across sociolinguistics as well as cognitive and theoretical linguistics. I read in media studies and general discourse analysis theory and methods, in addition to the above. In the end, then, I would say that my work is quite interdisciplinary, but this includes a heavy lean towards deeply qualitative and ethnographic work. And, as many who know me and my work would tell you without a moment’s hesitation, my work is of course deeply inspired by Jan Blommaert’s, whose work I also consider to be deeply political, deeply interdisciplinary, and both deeply sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological.

Özge Korkmaz: Since this is an internet-based ethnography, I am curious as to how you define your field-site, and whether you struggled at times with working outside of the traditional domains of research? I ask this question recognizing that every ethnography comes with its problems about where the field-site begins and ends, so I wonder what those problems would be for students of social media.

Lauren Zentz: This was indeed a challenging question, and something that there is not a robust literature on to my knowledge, especially when it comes to incorporating online and social media communities/communications, so I did find myself really improvising and having to define things for myself. Ultimately for any ethnography, of course, this is what we want anyway – the field site needs to be defined from the ground up because life and community organization generally don’t line up with our preconceived notions of them. But I did find myself on perpetually shifting ground, I would say, for at least the first year (of two) that I was conducting data collection. In this study, I started out thinking that I would conduct a study of the leadership of the state organization of Pantsuit Republic Texas. This was a group that lived throughout the state but mostly in Austin, Dallas, and Houston. Given that we only met online on Slack, Facebook, and a group phone call website called FreeConferenceCall.com, I was of course unable to gain the trust of the people who I’d imagined would become my research participants – the eight or so members of the state board (although I was given permission to start this study from two of the leaders of the state board, who I already knew and who lived in Houston). Because I could not gain people’s trust, I simply could not do the study in the way that I had first dreamt it up. And so my field site had to shift dramatically. I stepped back, continued my secretarial duties for the state board, and then reflected on how I had gotten involved in the organization in the first place, and only then did I realize that I needed to go to the people who I already knew. These were, again, the two people from the state board who had initially authorized the study, and then people with whom I had worked in the leadership of PSR’s local counterpart, Pantsuit Republic Houston. So I went back to these folks and changed my strategy to collecting data from their Facebook posts both in and outside of both PSR and PSRH’s secret Facebook groups, as well as research interviews and field notes. I asked sixteen or so people in total to participate, and ultimately ended up with a total of eight. Of these eight, some were more available than others for various work, home, and activism related reasons, and so I collected more and less information from each depending on their individual circumstances and my relationships with them each individually.

After all of this strategy shifting, my primary source of data became Facebook. So this was primarily an online ethnography, but let’s not forget that there is not a separation between online and offline life, contrary to some early (and continuing) beliefs that online life is supposedly fake and offline life is putatively real. As with every technology, from the telegraph to the phone and the television and so on, these have all been integrated into our lives. We don’t have a TV-watching life and a non-TV watching life; we just have a life, in which we watch TV and then refer to what we’ve watched after the fact. Similarly, we have a life in which we engage on various online social media platforms via our smartphones, our tablets, our desktop and laptop computers, and so on. On these sites we engage in individual chats, group chats, secret group pages, public pages, our personal walls on which we post publicly and/or privately, and so on, and then we met with several of the people we were just talking to online and we continue the conversation or move on to different topics. I engaged with my research participants online, but I also met up with them in person, at state board meetings, local PSRH public meetings, protests and other events. So while I emphasize online data in this book, it is informed by a more holistic experience while I was acting as a member (albeit peripheral) of the leadership groups of these organizations.

Özge Korkmaz: As ethnographers, we already know that whatever it is that gives political identities their unity of meaning is not static but processual. Yet we are also pretty good at documenting the ways people strive to create a somewhat stable one that is consistent with its own facts. What does this identity-work look like in the internet? What resources and techniques are available to people?

Lauren Zentz: I actually just met with a couple of my research participants the other day – now that they had contributed to the construction of a monograph through their own words via social media posts and interviews, they wanted to a have a sort of mini book club about it. It was really fun. But the reason I bring it up is just to say that we talked about how much data I ended up collecting in this study. Over 13,000 screenshots from over 6,000 original posts. Plus interviews, plus field notes, and so on. It was so, so overwhelming. But I found that something similar to what has happened in my previous studies happened as I sorted through all the data – and even as I simply watched my participants’ posts go by on my news feed on a daily basis. What happened is that the themes started to repeat themselves. This is sort of a standard, nonformal cue for how we know we’ve finally collected enough data – the themes that we’ve seen arise through our grounded, inductive experience start to repeat themselves. So as I watched these participants “write themselves into being” (boyd 2010) – particularly as political and activist beings – over the two-ish years of posts and interactions I had with them, I started to see the themes of the narratives they were constructing, over time and across interactions, about themselves, their activist group(s), and the geopolitical formations in which they found themselves, and this is how I saw those stable and unified stories emerge over time.

Özge Korkmaz: Lastly, increasingly our lives become suffused with contradictions that emerge out of a perceived gap between ethical commitments, on one hand, and the real situation, on the other. What does the world of internet activism have to offer us in terms of contemporary configurations of morality and politics? Do you think this desire to get involved in things, especially against the background of the rise of social movements across the globe, teach us something new about politics and political systems?

Lauren Zentz: I’m really not sure that it teaches us anything new about people’s desire to get involved because I’m not sure we actually do get more involved. I don’t want this prior statement, however, to come across as contradictory with the critiques that I posit (building on others’ work) in the book regarding notions such as “slacktivism”. I do think that there is value to, as Dennis (2019) reframes the former term, “microactivism”. Let’s take, for instance, a conversation that was held in the secret PSRH group in late 2018 – so two years after the formation of these groups/after Trump’s election. Lucy, a leader in both PSRH and PSR who was very active both on and offline in these and ally organizations, wrote a post describing her metamorphosis, basically from a rather soft-spoken person with opinions she didn’t bother voicing much into a very outspoken person who was not at all shy about her beliefs and opinions, political or otherwise. After she authored this post, numerous people who participated online in the PSRH group responded that they, too, had undergone such a change. They had shifted their relationships, gotten rid of people who did not support their more outspoken selves, spoken up more to family members with whom they disagreed, and so on. And those responding to Lucy’s posts were certainly not as active offline as she was; however, their membership in this support community that had come together around a shared set of political beliefs/ideologies after the 2016 election had provided them at least one important source of social support that enabled them to stand firm in how they felt about the US’s political circumstances at the time. So in this case we see that online activities that might be derided by some as slacktivism were actually quite the contrary – they were in many senses life changing. So perhaps the growth of online activism at best has taught me that lots of people do want to get involved, and they really do care, but the burdens of regular life prevent them from doing anything more than talking online about what they care about. Face to face activism, as I witnessed it through my engagements with my research participants as well as the other leaders of these groups, is immensely time consuming, and, as I write in the book, people with families, full time jobs, and so on, quite frankly might be relieved to have a social media outlet where they can feel connected to people who feel the same as them because they certainly don’t have the time, energy, bandwidth, and so on to meet up in face to face activities and “do the work”. They instead provide and participate in a sort of critical mass of moral and ideological support that helps keep the movement moving.

In this light, I suppose it is appropriate to end where I began, mentioning Jan Blommaert, who referred to online activities as expansions of our communicative repertoires. As he and Ondřej Prochazka wrote specifically in reference to online activism, this “knowledge activism” in online spaces must be “serious business” (Prochazka and Blommaert 2019), and as such worthy of serious consideration as an integral part of how people communicate throughout the myriad contexts of their daily lives. In this book, I hope to have given insight into how such serious business played itself out in a quite momentous shift in national, state-level, and local politics in the US.
Teri Silvio on her new book, Puppets, Gods, and Brands

November 18th, 2019

https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/product/puppets-gods-and-brands-theorizing-the-age-of-animation-from-taiwan/

Interview by Ilana Gershon

Ilana Gershon: What first led you to start thinking about animation?

Teri Silvio: Well, I started off by studying drama, and I wrote my dissertation on Taiwanese Opera. Taiwanese Opera is a genre in which women play all of the leading roles, both male and female, and the vast majority of fans are also women. I chose it because I was interested in how cross-gender performance works in contexts where it’s a long-standing historical tradition, rather than consciously feminist experimentation. I was writing up my project proposal around the time Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter were published, and basically, I was curious whether drag could still be considered “subversive” when it was what your mother and grandmother watched. (The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes and no — Taiwanese women who grew up watching this genre tended to already think of gender primarily as a kind of habitus, but they didn’t think that had anything to do with why men had more power in Taiwanese society.) Anyway, when I started working at a research institute in Taiwan, I had to come up with a new project. At temple festivals I had noticed that there were often two stages, one showing the opera, and another showing puppetry, which was a genre that was performed and watched primarily by older men. Also, I had seen some of the Pili puppetry series on television, and was amazed by it. It looked like someone had decided to remake Tsui Hark’s swordsman fantasy films using puppets — there were all kinds of wild special effects, and theme songs, along with the romanticization of brotherhood you get in the swordsman genre, I just loved it at first sight. So I decided to do a project on puppetry and its relationship to masculinity. I was curious why drama and puppetry were so gendered in Taiwan. I found out pretty quickly that after puppetry was adapted to television, and then to digital video, women had started to become fans. In fact, the most active fans of the Pili series were women. One of the activities that women fans of Pili enjoyed was cosplay, and I started going to cons and interviewing the (mostly) women I found who were cosplaying puppet characters. I started asking them the questions I’d asked opera actresses and fans — Do you identify with the character you’re dressed as? How do you get into character?   And I would get these puzzled looks, or long descriptions of buying bolts of cloth and sewing costumes, but nothing about embodiment or psychological identification. When I asked people how they felt in costume, they’d say things like, “It’s like the character is with me,” but never “I feel like I am the character.” So that’s when I started to realize that there was an important, if elusive, difference between puppet characters and characters embodied by actors, and I started to think about puppetry as something more than just a variation on theatrical performance, that puppetry did something other than construct identities. And from there I started thinking about animation in the broader sense, what it means to bring objects to life.

Ilana Gershon: In your book, animation functions in the way that media or language functions for some analysts. Not every group understands what media or language does in the same way – Japanese approaches to cell phones are different than American approaches because of their media ideologies. What is a Taiwanese take on animation?

Teri Silvio: Different cultures have what I call different modes of animation — ideas about what kind of objects can be animated, what aspects of personhood can be projected into them, and how that can be done. These ideas are grounded in specific cosmologies, ideas about the nature of humanity and the nature of the non-human world, how they came into being, and the differences between them. Almost all anthropological studies of puppetry discuss its ritual functions. But I think the book that was most helpful for me was Scott Cutler Shershow’s book, Puppets and “Popular” Culture. Shershow looks at the theological grounding of puppetry in Western culture from Plato’s allegory of the cave to Jim Henson’s Muppets. He looks not just at puppetry practices, but at how puppetry has been used as a trope, and finds that despite changes in the moral values of puppetry in Western discourse, it is almost always seen as a version of “playing God,” as a re-enactment of Genesis.    In contrast, many scholars working on Japanese manga and anime, especially those writing about the works of Miyazaki Hayao and Oshii Mamoru, have noted how Japanese animation reflects Shinto animist ideas about all kinds of objects having spirits or souls.

What I found in Taiwan was that practices of investing things with agency tended to focus on a specific type of object, the ang-a, which is an anthropomorphic figurine, usually small. Puppets are the paradigmatic form of ang-a, but statues of gods which are made for worship are also called “just ang-a” before they are ritually animated. Chinese folk religion is very human-centric, and investing material objects with human qualities has to start with the object being given physical human qualities — faces and bodies. Animated animal characters in Taiwan, whether they are deities or logo characters, are almost always anthropomorphized.

Another important aspect of the religious grounding of animation in Taiwan comes from the way that religious icons have genealogies. New icons of a particular deity usually contain incense ash from the burner of an older icon, so there is a kind of contagious magic at work, with substance being passed down from “original” to “divided” icons. The proliferation of icons is seen as evidence of that god’s efficacy, and also as how that god comes to have more presence and power in people’s lives. One of my arguments is that, while people do not think that puppet or manga characters are ontologically similar to gods, they do see the relationship between popular culture characters and their many tie-in products as being similar to the relationship between gods and their icons, and there’s a lot of overlap between the vocabulary and practices of Chinese folk religion and those of Taiwanese puppetry and manga/anime fandoms.

Ilana Gershon: With Hong Kong protests happening in the background, along with such a complex legacy of various colonialisms in East Asia, I was wondering if you could speak to how easily some forms and aesthetics seem to travel in this region, despite or maybe because of the regional politics.

Teri Silvio: The markets in cultural products throughout East Asia are heavily influenced by two major producers, Japan and the United States, and domestic content producers are constantly struggling to break through their hegemony (the PRC is a special case here, where import of foreign cultural products are strictly limited by the state, but even there American and Japanese influence is felt). This has more directly to do with American control over distribution networks that was set up after World War II, and a concerted push by Japan to establish similar distribution networks throughout Asia starting in the late 1980s (which has been documented in detail by Koichi Iwabuchi and others). The degree to which different countries’ products dominate local markets varies, not only by country, but also by generation and by industry (for instance, in Taiwan, American, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and local bands are all competitive in the popular music market, but over 90% of the comic books on sale in Taiwan are translations of Japanese manga). So what popular culture is available, and what is mainstream, is largely determined by government policy and corporate strategy. The historical experience of colonialism is more a factor in terms of how cultural products are received in different countries. So for instance, Japanese cultural products are less controversial in Taiwan than in Korea or China, where there are frequent boycotts of Japanese products, and this has to do not only with the differences in how the Japanese administered different territories under their control in the early twentieth century, but also in how the colonial era took on different meanings in light of what came after.

In this context, Iwabuchi and others have argued that one reason Japan has succeeded in exporting so much of their popular culture throughout East Asia is the way that they create the sense of “cultural proximity,” the idea that contemporary Japan represents a kind of modernity different from that represented by Hollywood and other American products, a modernity that is less alien and more easily imagined as achievable. But the idea of cultural proximity can be a double-edged sword, especially if it is too explicit, since it can recall imperial Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” ideology.

In the book, I am more interested in what globalization looks like if we focus on animation genres, rather than performed, or live action ones. On the one hand, I look at how the Pili International Multimedia Company has tried to market their video puppetry overseas, trying out different models, with their most successful attempt at globalization happening when they cooperate with a Japanese animation creator. I argue that Pili crosses borders best when it presents a vision of what globalization might look like if it were motivated by traditional Chinese structures and concerns, and that the use of “traditional” genres and media creates a different kind of trans-East Asian cultural proximity from that created by idol dramas. So I note that, while the Pili company’s attempts to be “the Disney of Taiwan” largely failed, the fandom spread quite rapidly, through shared practices that might be thought of as “folk culture,” such as the collective re-creation of a wide variety of versions of the characters in different media, and the proliferation of ang-a. While the cultural proximity of idol dramas tries to make an end run around historical trauma by focusing on shared modernity, Taiwanese video puppetry makes an end run around the traumas of colonial and post-colonial modernity by focusing on aesthetics, practices, and ideologies that unite the pre-modern past and the post-modern present.

Ilana Gershon: You argue that men and women have different relationships to various forms of animation. In what ways and how is this shaped by overarching labor issues?

Teri Silvio: I look at this mainly in the chapter on cosplay, which is primarily an activity for women fans of puppetry, manga, and anime. I ask why cosplay is so appealing to young women, and not to men. I work from the basic premise that cosplay is one of many forms of play that function as a sort of safe, enjoyable place to practice skills and forms of sociality that are necessary in the less safe and enjoyable spaces, especially at work. Cosplay is, at the surface level, a kind of performance. And most cosplayers are working in the pink collar sector (as secretaries, kindergarten teachers, salespeople, and so on).   In the 1980s, Arlie Hochschild worked with flight attendants, and found that they think of their work in pretty classic Goffmanian terms – they saw their main work skills as performances of self, impression management, controlling the moods of passengers by controlling their own mood and embodiment. So one could see cosplay as a play form of the emotional labor that these women have to do in their jobs. But cosplay only started in the 1990s, and to find out why it became popular when it did, we need to look more closely at what has changed in pink collar labor. The Italian Autonomists are probably the theorists who have tried to outline what’s going on with post-industrial labor most thoroughly. While their idea of “immaterial labor” can be useful, and they do note gendered divisions of labor within that category (basically, men do programming, women do caretaking), the way they think about digital technology tends to help us understand what’s changing in men’s work, but cover up what’s happening in pink collar work. One of the big differences between the women cosplayers I interviewed and their mothers is how much of the work of emotional labor they do online, as opposed to in person. Taiwan has one of the world’s highest cellphone ownership and internet penetration rates, and young people here spend huge amounts of time on social networking platforms, online chat groups, cellphone messaging, and so on. Emotional work that their mothers did through embodiment, they have to do via online avatars or personae created through text and image, that is, through animation. But at the same time, of course, there are still lots of situations where they do have to do embodied performances of gender. So I think that one of the reasons why cosplay has replaced other forms of embodied play at this point in time is because it lets women play with how to negotiate performance and animation – how to communicate through the body without having to enter into a role, how to use their bodies as puppets instead of as outward manifestations of some inner essence.

Ilana Gershon: You suggest that animation can be the basis for a new form of political activism. How would this work?

Teri Silvio: If only I knew – I’d go out and do it! You should probably ask John Bell, because he’s been doing amazing political puppetry and thinking about how to use puppets for activism for so long. But I do see a lot of potential for getting out of the traps of identity politics if we start thinking of identity as something that’s created through animation, through the collective projection of aspects of our selves outward, rather than as the interiorization of roles. It might help us let go of the idea that our identities are something we possess, and other people’s identities are something we have no stake in or responsibility for. Since I finished the book, I have seen some intriguing examples of people using what I would call animation practices in political activism. I was on a fabulous conference panel recently (thanks to Laurel Kendall for organizing it), and one of the papers was by Moumita Sen, who talked about a group of leftist activists in West Bengal who have been trying to create Adivasi (indigenous) solidarity by remaking a demon into a god. They made statues of this new god with dark skin and muscular bodies, combining traditional Hindu iconography with the iconography of the working-class hero.   And I’ve seen the image of a cute cartoon pig in lots of graffiti from the Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests. At first I thought it was McDull, the protagonist of a series of anime who is a little boy pig being raised by his overworked mother in the city, and who is affectionately seen as a symbol of Hong Kong identity. But it isn’t; apparently it’s a sort of emoji character from a messaging service that the young protesters are using. Which is in some ways more interesting, because emoji characters are more open than anime characters (although the categories overlap, as some anime characters have their own emoji series), they primarily represent states of mind, what they say about identity is there, but secondary. Anyway, I’m really hoping I can do some more work on the use of emoji characters soon, because I’m really intrigued by how they circulate and can give people a sense of a collective mood, or set of moods, emerging from the chaos of online discourse.
Morgan Ames on The Charisma Machine

October 14th, 2019

On Henry Jenkins’ blog, he interview Morgan Ames about the One Laptop Per Child project. With Jenkins’ permission, I am re-posting the interview here (but see the original here: http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2019/10/3/interview-with-morgan-j-ames-on-the-charisma-machine-the-life-death-and-legacy-of-one-laptop-per-child-part-i

Henry Jenkins: You root the OLPC project in a particular conception of the relationship between technology and childhood in the thinking of Seymour Papert. What do you see as some of the core assumptions shaping this vision of ‘the technically precocious boy”?

Morgan Ames: Nicholas Negroponte was certainly the public face of One Laptop per Child, but he readily admitted in his marathon of talks in the early days of OLPC that the very idea for the project was actually Papert’s, even though Papert was already retired when OLPC was announced. He often said that the whole project was “the life’s work of Seymour Papert.”

And when you read through all of Papert’s public writing, from the late 1960s through the early 2000s, you can clearly see that connection. Papert started writing about the liberatory potential of giving kids free access to computers not long after after he joined MIT in the 1960s. Throughout the 1970s, he was a central figure in developing the LOGO programming environment. The branch he worked on, which ended up being the dominant branch, was built around the ideals of what he called “constructionism,” as a tool for kids to use to explore mathematical and technical concepts in a grounded, playful way. He kept advocating these same views throughout the 1980s and 1990s, even as LOGO lost steam after many of the really grand utopian promises attached to it failed to materialize.

I argue that one of the reasons for this failure is that LOGO and many constructionist projects are built around a number of assumptions about childhood and technology that just aren’t true for all children — and in fact are only true for a particular set of children, mostly boys, who have a lot of support to explore technical systems.

Some of this support comes from their immediate environment: they have parents who bought them a computer, who helped them figure it out, who were there to troubleshoot, who supported their technical interests. If it wasn’t a parent, it was someone else they could turn to with questions. The programmers I’ve interviewed who proudly say they are self-taught had a whole constellation of resources like this to help them along.

But some of this support also comes from the cultural messages that we hear, and often propagate, about children. Messages about boys’ supposedly “natural” interest in tinkering with machines goes back at least 100 years — there’s this great volume called The Boy Mechanic: 700 Things for Boys to Do that was published in 1913! Then there’s transistor radio culture, engineering competitions, and a whole host of technical toys specifically marketed to boys in the decades following. Amy Ogata, Susan Douglas, Ruth Oldenziel, and many other fantastic historical scholars have traced these histories in depth. With the rise of computing, this same boy-centered engineering culture gets connected to programming, displacing all of the women who had been doing that work as low-paid clerical workers around and after World War II, as Nathan Ensmenger and Mar Hicks have shown. The same boy-centered culture also defined the video game industry in the 1980s.

From all of this, at every turn boys — and particularly white middle-class boys — are told that they belong in this culture, that they are (or can be) naturals at programming. Everyone else has to account for themselves in these worlds, and everyone else faces ostracism, harassment, and worse if they dare to stick around. It’s something I became pretty familiar with myself throughout my computer science major.

When I talk about the “technically precocious boy,” it’s both of these pieces — the specific material and social support certain kids get, but also the larger cultural messages they live with and have to make sense of in their own lives. This is what social scientists call a “social imaginary,” or a coherent and shared vision that helps define a group.

Unless projects very actively reject and counter these social imaginaries, they ride the wave of them. One Laptop per Child is one of these, just as Papert’s other projects were. Even though these projects tended to speak inclusively about “girls and boys” and “many ways of knowing,” they then turned around and extolled the virtues of video games and talked about technical tinkering in ways that wholly relied on this century of cultural messaging, which had long been incredibly exclusionary.

Henry Jenkins: Did this conception constitute a blind spot when applied, unproblematically, to childhoods lived in other parts of the world? How might we characterize the childhoods of the people who were encountering these devices in Latin America?

Morgan Ames: The biggest issue with relying on the social imaginary of the technically precocious boy is that the kids who identified with it have always made up a very small part of the population. If you think back to the youths of many of those who contributed to OLPC, who were discussing its similarities with the Commodores or Apple IIs of their childhoods — most of their peers couldn’t care less about computers. So to assume that somehow all or most kids across the Global South, or anywhere in the world, would care when this kind of passion is idiosyncratic even in places that have long had decent access to computers is a bit baffling to me.

When I’ve said as much to friends who worked on OLPC, I often heard something along the lines of, “well, those past machines maybe only appealed to some kids, but this one will have much more universal appeal!” And Papert wrote about the universal potential of computers too — he called them the “Proteus of machines,” with something to appeal to everyone. I see similar stories in movements to teach all kids to code.

But the majority of the kids I got to know in Paraguay — as well as those I met in Uruguay and Peru — just weren’t very interested in these under-powered laptops. I found that over half of kids in Paraguay would rather play with friends or spend time with their families, and didn’t find anything all that compelling about the device. The one third of students who did use their laptops much at all liked to connect to the Internet, play little games, watch videos, listen to music — pretty similar to what many kids I know in the U.S. like to do with computers. This is not to erase the cultural differences that were there, much less the legacy of imperialism still very much present across the region. But it really drives home just how wrong the assumption was that kids in the Global South would be drawn to these machines in a way that differed fundamentally from most kids in the Global North, that they’d really want to learn to program.

Henry Jenkins: You correctly note that the metaphor of the school as a factory often results in a dismissal of teacher’s role in the educational process. Yet, the OLPC and other Media Lab projects have depended heavily upon teachers and other educators to help motivate adaption and use of these new platforms and practices. How have these two ideas been reconciled in practice?

Morgan Ames: The social imaginary of school-as-factory is a perfect foil for the social imaginary of the naturally creative child (and the technically-precocious boy as an offshoot of it). We certainly see messages all the time that portray schools with derision and contempt — in spite of a long and well-documented history of school reform, schools are often talked about as hopelessly outdated, mechanistic, and antithetical to children’s creativity. (This is not to say that I think schools are perfect as they are — I certainly dislike drill-and-test practices, for one — but they are complicated and culturally-embedded institutions, often asked to create impossibly large cultural changes with impossibly scant resources.) When One Laptop per Child, or other Media Lab projects, echo some of these sentiments, they hardly need explain themselves — the school-as-factory social imaginary readily comes to hand.

But you’re right that how schools relate to teachers, and how teachers relate to these projects, is much more complicated. In his writing Papert very clearly condemns schools, but is much more equivocal about teachers, often casting them as “co-learners” even as they are charged with steering children’s learning toward mathematical ends. Other OLPC leaders said some terrible things about teachers early on — more than one said that most teachers were drunk or absentee, for instance — but local projects, including Paraguay Educa (the local NGO in charge the OLPC project in Paraguay), conducted teacher training sessions and expected teachers to use the laptops in classrooms. At the same time, OLPC and many local OLPC projects, including Paraguay Educa’s, talked about how the most interesting things kids would do with their laptops would probably happen outside of classrooms, and that they would soon leapfrog past their teachers in ability.

I can’t fully resolve this paradox, but I can say that keeping the social imaginary of the school-as-factory alive is pretty valuable to many ed-tech projects that promise to overhaul an educational system that seems to be both in urgent need of fixing and receptive to quick technological fixes. However, it’s one thing to paint a rosy picture of the possibilities for technologically-driven educational reform without the need for teacher buy-in — but then when it comes down to actually implementing a reform effort, teachers become a necessary part of the project, because ultimately they are a necessary part of learning.

Henry Jenkins: What are some of the important differences between the schools described in the rhetoric around OLPC and the actual schools you encountered on the ground?

Morgan Ames: Negroponte exhibited some very wishful thinking in justifying the costs of the program. He’d tell governments that they should think of this as equivalent to a textbook, and put their textbook budget into this program. Amortized over five years, he said, a hundred-dollar laptop would be equivalent to the twenty dollars per year per student that Brazil, China, and other places budgeted for textbooks. But I found only one school in Paraguay that consistently used textbooks, and it was because they were sponsored by an evangelical church in Texas. If schools had any, they had some very old textbooks that were kept in the front office for teachers’ reference only. Most teachers wrote lessons on a blackboard, and students copied them into notebooks that they were responsible for buying.

Papert had a version of this analogy as well — but instead of textbooks, he equated computers with pencils. You wouldn’t give a classroom one pencil to share, he would say derisively — but even if OLPC’s XO laptop had actually been $100 rather than close to $200, that’s a far cry from a ten-cent pencil. Moreover, even ten-cent pencils were items that not all Paraguayan students could consistently afford. A good portion of Paraguay’s population are subsistence farmers and the Paraguayan school system has been underfunded for many decades now; some schools don’t have working toilets, and none provide photocopiers, paper, or even toilet paper or soap. Most classrooms did not have plugs for charging laptops or WiFi routers — the schools, with the help of local project leaders and parent volunteers, had to install those. And in some cases, the wiring that they used was mislabeled, so the plugs failed.

Despite these rough conditions, many teachers really did care about teaching — they were not “drunk or absent entirely,” as Negroponte once claimed. But much like teachers in the U.S., they were beset from all sides by demands for their time, they were very underpaid, and many exhibited signs of burnout. Even so, some were really excited about the project, but most really didn’t have the time they would have needed to integrate a difficult-to-use laptop into their curriculum. In the book I include several vignettes from my fieldwork that describe in detail how these teachers would struggle to use laptops for lessons in spite of broken machines, uninstalled software, slow networks, and quickly-draining batteries. It’s no wonder that nearly all gave up in time.

Henry Jenkins: The Constructionist paradigm leads us to see the web and media use as “distractions” from the core OLPC mission at the same time as the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative was emphasizing the kinds of learning which could take place around games, social media, and participatory culture more generally. How would your results look if read through this different frame?

Morgan Ames: Aside from some fairly abstract discussions of the virtues of videogames, constructionism generally doesn’t really discuss media use — it seems to exist in a cultural vacuum where students encounter a Platonic (or perhaps Papertian?) ideal of a computer with nothing but LOGO, and maybe Wikipedia, on it. But the connected learning framework — which, in the spirit of cultural studies, takes children’s interests and media worlds seriously as ideal starting-points for learning — was very much on my own mind throughout my fieldwork and analysis. And I was deeply impressed by the ways some kids found innovative ways around the XO’s hardware and software limitations, and the ways that a new video or music file would spread, student to student, through schools.

The piece that was largely missing, though, was a way to bridge those interests with learning outcomes like literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking that are important for effectively navigating the world. A handful of parents and teachers had ideas about how to shape their children’s interests toward more learning-oriented ends, and I have a chapter devoted to their stories. But they were the exception, not the norm.

Moreover, I would bring a critical media studies lens to this as well, and ask just what kind of influence advertisers including Nestle, Nickelodeon, and more should have in children’s educations. These companies developed content specifically for the XO laptop that was widely popular during my fieldwork, and thus had preferential access to children via an avenue that most considered “educational.” While I love the connected learning approach of really centering children’s cultures in the learning process, I am very critical of companies’ efforts to make money off of that.

__________

Morgan G. Ames researches the ideological origins of inequality in the technology world, with a focus on utopianism, childhood, and learning. Her book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019) draws on archival research and a seven-month ethnography in Paraguay to explore the cultural history, results, and legacy of the OLPC project — and what it tells us about the many other technology projects that draw on similar utopian ideals. Morgan is an assistant adjunct professor in the School of Information and interim associate director of research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in Data Science and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies.”
Ben Tausig on his book, Bangkok is Ringing

July 22nd, 2019

Interview by Mack Hagood

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/bangkok-is-ringing-9780190847524

Mack Hagood: Bangkok is Ringing brings us into the center of the Red Shirt protests in Bangkok during 2010 and 2011—a truly historic moment in Thailand that garnered international attention. Was the movement your original object of study when you headed to Thailand as a PhD candidate? What precipitated the movement and what unfolded after you arrived?

Ben Tausig: This massive occupation, and the movement that initiated it, was not my original object of study. Although I was interested in music and politics, and although the Red Shirts had been gaining energy for a while when I began my research, the dynamics of the movement would have been impossible to predict. But on arriving, the occupation of central Bangkok was just underway, and unsettling everything, so it would have been impossible to turn away from what was going on, no less the extraordinary role of sound in the protests. So I turned towards them. And then the movement remained so active – and so central to Thai politics – for so long that it seemed wise to stick with it. Moreover, in time the Red Shirt movement began to find performative echoes in other places, especially parts of the Arab Spring, which only made it feel more relevant.

Mack Hagood: Your book explores the protest movement through sonic performance and media of sounding and listening, revealing “uneven geographies of sound” made up of smaller “sonic niches.” Please walk us through some of these actors and media and how they feed and enact a protest movement.

Ben Tausig: The book is structured like the protests themselves. It is divided into seventeen chapters that vary in length, scope, and tone, and that at different points reflect or conflict with one another. That’s exactly what it was like being inside the Red Shirt camps. They were ad hoc spaces full of internal variations of class, region, and aesthetics. And their sounds often tracked with these differences. I call the subspaces within the rallies “sonic niches” because, like ecological niches, they existed in a state of flux, as well as in profound and dependent relation to neighboring spaces. Moreover, they were highly sensitive, and it wasn’t unusual to hear one of them disappear entirely due to some small change in, say, police enforcement of a public amplification law. Political movements are typically coalitional like this, as Mouffe and Laclau remind us. The elder bookseller whose formative experience of dissent was the Marxist movements of the Vietnam War era may not have much to say to a kid from the northeast who adored billionaire former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. And it follows that the performative proletarianism of the former’s songs for life folk tunes did not always mesh well with the latter’s hip-hop. But they and their sounds found ways to coexist under the banner of a movement that they each believed would benefit them.

Mack Hagood: One of your main theoretical interventions is to dispute the common claim in sound studies that sound is unbounded and transcendent. You make a careful study of how sound is often constrained and you enlist it “to help us understand how agency caroms and fractures, how political actors often find themselves bouncing off walls rather than frictionlessly through them” (6). Can you describe how themes of constraint, blockage, patience, and persistence operate through the book in terms of sonic and political agency?

Ben Tausig: This theme arose from firsthand experience of the protests. They were so densely crowded that one could only ever experience them while partially or totally stuck, for example making long and arduous sojourns (we’re talking hours) across, say, 50-meter stretches of road to buy a bottle of water or find a friend. For those who know Bangkok, this feeling of being stuck is achingly familiar, because traffic is so intense and the roads so poorly accommodated to it (on this as a historical problem, see the work of Claudio Sopranzetti, who was in Bangkok at the same time, and who analyzes mobility very well). In my case, this experience suggested itself first as a metaphor for the ways that sound, as an agent of political force, is likewise beset by many stubborn obstacles. But why stop at the metaphor? After all, protest movements depend upon sound to announce themselves as totalities, to produce an affective sense of unity, and to make specific points emphatically. I began to reflect on the mundane ways that sound did not travel freely at Red Shirt events, and to consider how this lack of mobility could help us think about obstacles to political change, as well as to the performance of a desire for political change.

Mack Hagood: I was thrilled to learn about the cultural and political valences of luk thung and molam, genres of Thai music that some western readers may have encountered through reissues on the Sublime Frequencies label. You also movingly describe some musical moments involving these genres. Can you talk a bit about their history and importance in the Red Shirt movement?

Ben Tausig: Amporn Jirattikorn as well as James Mitchell have written about the political history of these genres, as has Terry Miller (in an earlier moment). Sublime Frequencies typifies a relatively new kind of “world music,” a phenomenon that has been analyzed by Portia Seddon and David Novak, among others. Briefly, decades- or even centuries-old genres circulate today in a weird and remediated fashion that requires – decidedly! – a new auditory ethics. That’s a long way of saying that most western listeners who hear mor lam and luk thung are likely to do so through media products that obscure their political valences. In what we might call hipster-colonial commerce, these genres are typically marketed and heard as psychedelic or otherwise exotic – a familiar and regrettably orientalist framing – whereas in practice they contain a rich poetics of exclusion from political power. That poetry can tell us a great deal about how people identify with rurality in Thailand, especially as a moral ground within a country that’s long been a site of unregulated, exploitative capitalist development. The Red Shirts’ use of these genres therefore necessitates a closer examination of the latent possibility of a left-wing instinct that has been unnaturally excluded, one might well say repressed, from political discourse (Communist political parties, for example, are formally illegal). The possibility of the eventual return of the left, even as a kernel, therefore cannot be ruled out after considering how mor lam and luk thung functioned for the Red Shirts. This was an exciting part of the research, and I still hold out hope for this kernel to grow, even though it is an interpretation that has not yet been borne out.

Mack Hagood: I hesitate to pursue this next line of questioning, both because it may simply be a reductive and facile cross-cultural comparison and because it may seem to signal political commitments I don’t own. However, while reading Bangkok is Ringing, I couldn’t help but think repeatedly about the political rallies of Donald Trump. There are so many similarities: a rural political movement sneered at by many among the urban and educated; a wealthy, media-savvy, populist leader who, like Tahksin, benefitted from and perpetuated neoliberalism while also railing against its social ills; a similar ecosystem that sprung up around the rallies of chanting, blaring music, homemade media, and political performativity—even the red color of the iconic MAGA hat! I have often thought that those of us working in the politics of sound, media, and affect studies should be doing a lot more work on Trumpism. What insights did the Thai example provide as you watched these events transpire in the United States? Does your sonic approach provide us ways of understanding what is happening here now?

Ben Tausig: Absolutely. Politically and economically, Thailand tends to foreshadow certain global developments, perhaps because capital is quite free to operate as it wishes there, so it bumbles into crises with less friction. That’s an undeveloped theory, but I am not the only one to notice it. And indeed, Thailand had a billionaire populist before the US did, although one could also draw comparisons to George W. Bush, who was elected at the same time as Thaksin. It is highly ironic that there is even an argument for the emergence of a leftist politics within the Red Shirts, given what a violent, autocratic neoliberal Thaksin could be (he bears some similarities to Duterte). But the fact remains that some percentage of Red Shirts joined the movement in spite of Thaksin, not because of him. One can therefore draw some meaningful connections between the Red Shirts and the American populist right, and it is worth reading Kasian Tejapira’s prescient insights from 2006. But the comparison has its limits.

Meanwhile, yes, I think sound studies can draw some narrow comparisons here. Sonically and otherwise, Trumpism cast itself as a puncture of elite spaces. The Red Shirts cast themselves in much the same way. Their occupations were provocatively staged in the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan parts of Bangkok – precisely the areas from which they as working people were excluded. They blared rustic songs, voices, and timbres in the most refined districts of the country. Some Trump supporters were likewise given, especially in the winter of 2016-17, to entering public spaces that they felt were the province of liberals, and shouting insults as a form of spatialized comeuppance against people (and, ostensibly, a system) they disliked. The comparisons stop, of course, when we consider the racial privilege at stake in the U.S. case study, not to mention the homophobia, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia that explicitly underwrote Trump’s election. But I do think there was a similar value in both instances to using sound to penetrate the spaces of a political opposition.

Mack Hagood: You have taken it upon yourself to self-produce an audio version of your book, which is available on your website. What opportunities and challenges does the audiobook format present to academia?

Ben Tausig: I’ll link self-promotionally here to a brief piece in the Journal of Popular Music Studies that came out this summer, and summarize it by saying that there are enormous opportunities right now for sound studies, as well as music studies, to imagine new kinds of critical published products that combine conventional analysis with audible material. But we also have to be very thoughtful about the economics of these ventures, given where academic publishing is today, and the pitfalls that come with shiny new objects (namely, that scholars could be asked to do even more uncompensated labor than they already perform).

Mack Hagood: Finally, is there any conversation or debate that you find most interesting in sound studies right now? Any current plans or projects that intervene in it?

Ben Tausig: I am always drawn to deep anthropological work on sound, especially that which addresses people and spaces outside of the United States and Europe. This is a lack that I believe emerged from the early tendency in sound studies to canonize experimentalist composers as well as philosophers of sound, namely John Cage and Murray Schafer, who despite their allegedly global thinking were firmly grounded in traditions of European art music. Cage and Schafer certainly give students of sound a lot to work with, but there are also enormous presumptions in their work about sound and its relationship to nature, gender, race, and modernity. Feminist sound studies is another growth area now, and it has produced some excellent and urgent critiques of the ways that sound studies has defined noise, for example. And as a body of scholarship it comprises probably the most powerful critique of the Cagean and Schaferian traditions. Tara Rodgers and Marie Thompson are two essential thinkers here.

I do have a new project, and it is an effort to think about some of the conversations referenced just above. It is a historical study of the cosmopolitan aural and musical world of Bangkok (and elsewhere in Thailand) during the Vietnam War. The period that Benedict Anderson called “The American Era” was an era of unprecedented economic development, at the center of which was music and nightlife. I’m therefore examining the stories and legacies of musicians – Americans, Thais, Filipinos, Europeans – who were active in Thailand during those years, as well as the asymmetrical auditory relationships between U.S. soldiers and the Thai people who served them in a nascent hospitality industry, including sex workers. The project has already gotten pretty deep and it is lots of fun to combine archival research with interviews and ethnography.