Tag Archives: Sweden

Jennifer Mack on her book, The Construction of Equality

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Interview by Lynda Chubak

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-construction-of-equality

Lynda Chubak: Bringing together architecture, urban planning and anthropology, you trace the decades-long transformation of Södertälje, Sweden arising from the settlement and spatial practices of Syriac immigration. What drew you to this project and what were your primary goals going in?

Jennifer Mack: Before I started the project, I had a longstanding interest in thinking about alternative, minoritarian forms of public space in European cities. I wanted to understand whether European public parks and town squares were exclusive, and, if so, what kinds of other spaces migrants had been developing to accommodate their needs to gather. And when I first visited Södertälje, I had the good fortune to meet some very enthusiastic soccer fans who were also Assyrian nationalists and Syriac Orthodox Christians. During that summer, I followed the fans (of the Swedish team Assyriska FF) as much as possible and sometimes 24 hours a day for a documentary project I was working on with the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. As I followed the fans to away games in central Sweden, to a burger joint in town, to the high school gym where they painted banners for a match at 3 o’clock in the morning, and to their homes, I learned a massive amount about the town and the role its physical space had in Syriac Orthodox Christian diasporic practices of identity-making. That’s because they talked about those spaces all the time. It also happened to be the 50th anniversary of the Assyrian Democratic Organization, and people from all over the world were in the town for the celebrations. So, I quickly understood that places like the soccer arena, the Syriac Orthodox churches, and the cultural associations in the town were not just “standard” Swedish public spaces or forms of architecture.

Another primary goal of mine was to examine how Swedish tropes of segregation played a role in creating both means and methods for spatial intervention on the part of both politicians and design professionals in that country. During my research, I observed that segregation (and fears of future segregation) was frequently used to justify holistic, sometimes quite radical approaches to urban design and planning. These approaches rested on ensuring that enclaves would not emerge, or, if they did, that they would somehow be disrupted or dispersed. Why were ethnic enclaves regarded as a problem? I wondered. Of course, as you can read in the book, there is a long tradition harkening back to the expansion of the Swedish welfare state that assumed that standardization and building norms would produce societal equality. Part of the logic there was that historical built environments in which people had constructed building in formally distinct ways or lived in housing that specifically telegraphed their class status had reinforced socioeconomic divisions in the society. So, developing enclaves in the 21st century still served as a representation of the very opposite of that approach, especially when ethnic minority groups were behind them as clients or designers. I wanted to understand why these architectural projects were so threatening and why they were repeatedly framed as a so-called planning problem.

Lynda Chubak: You offer an alternative to a common assumption that geographic segregation or enclavization is an inequality problem to solve. Can you briefly describe what you mean by “urban design from below”, and how this played out in Södertälje to unsettle understandings of integration?

Jennifer Mack: My notion of “urban design from below” helped me to theorize how people whom planners understood as only users – not as agents in designing or forming the city – were actually reshaping whole neighborhoods. I presented this as a process that happened building by building and over a very long period of time – a process that was very different from the faster ones that planners might themselves label urban design but that had, nonetheless, changed the main spaces for shopping, social gathering, and leisure in one neighborhood, Geneta, replacing the welfare-state planned town center where those activities were supposed to take place. Urban design is traditionally positioned as a top-down practice carried out by design professionals, but this change in Geneta happened because of the individual and collective initiatives of migrants themselves. So, suddenly we saw that each building that had been constructed had become part of a larger whole that was not imagined – as a master plan – in advance. Instead, this hub for the community grew, one could say, both by the accumulation of buildings and by the socially-enacted, everyday reinforcement of the idea that some areas of the city were more accommodating of specific Syriac needs – such as wedding planning services or Orthodox religious services – than others. Over time, Syriacs changed the built environment of the city of Södertälje at the urban scale. This process happened slowly and required Syriacs to interact with professional planners and architects. In other words, they changed plans piecemeal, but their efforts had large-scale results. In fact, if you look at an aerial view or map of the Geneta area today, the Syriac commercial and social zone looks very much like a coherent urban design that an urban planner could have drawn. In my view, and in light of their numerous architectural projects, renovations, and productions of space, the way that both planners and politicians typically relegated Syriacs to the user category was inherently discriminatory. This discursive move suggested that they were only passive and perhaps just recipients of other people’s buildings and spaces. By using the rubric “urban design from below,” then, I wanted to call attention instead to how Syriacs are active, agentive participants in the architectural development of the city, and I hoped – and hope – that planners might see my work as a call to engage with minority groups and their architectural aspirations differently.

Lynda Chubak: Part of your investigation included working for one year as an intern at the Södertälje Municipal Planning Department. For new researchers interested in anthropology of bureaucracy or documentation, what were some of the pitfalls, benefits, and/or surprises of doing ethnography within a government department?

Jennifer Mack:This is a really interesting question! It’s one that I have also raised with some of my students, many of whom are studying to be architects or planners themselves. One of the main pitfalls of doing ethnography in a government department, I would say, is that bureaucrats – and especially politicians – typically have assumptions about what you want to know and, when interviewed, can present something like a prepared speech as a response to your questions. In these bureaucratic settings, I always recommend paying attention to things like topics brought up during coffee or lunch breaks or before or after what one’s fieldwork interlocutors might think of as a real meeting about a project. These interstitial moments are often when the really interesting things get said, rather than during the meetings themselves. Furthermore, and this may be pretty self-evident because it applies to all forms of ethnographic research, I found that it was really helpful to establish a good relationship with colleagues before attempting to interview them, if interviews are planned. If you look at some of the ethnographies of planning offices or architecture firms that have been done in the last few years, you also see an emphasis on things like the gestures of different people within meetings, or on practices of project representation (like model building). For me, the relationship between bureaucrats and their objects (computers, drawings, chalkboards, file boxes, and the like) are also very interesting. One challenge, of course, is that you don’t usually record video of such encounters, so I find it important to find ways to remember how the relations between human designers and their non-human professional objects are bodily enacted (through the hands, through the voice, and so on), and to remain actively aware of those relations while talking with them.

Lynda Chubak: You describe how planners, as agents of the Swedish state, sought to create equality and redefine citizenship through the ambitious Million housing program, and the built environment more generally.  With a specific ethnographic example, can you explain spatial governmentality and how it relates to these kinds of recalibrations of citizenship?


Jennifer Mack:Yes, I was very inspired by Sally Engle Merry’s ideas of spatial governmentality when thinking about the Swedish welfare state and its explicit use of an architectural toolbox to enact its own desired modes of citizenship during the 20th century. This is in part what Yvonne Hirdman refers to as “setting life right” in her influential book on that topic. As you say, these recalibrations of citizenship were in fact part of a major modern project to transform Swedish society, and this was also possible because of a continuous period of Social Democratic leadership from the 1930s until the 1970s. We have to remember that Sweden’s housing was among the worst in Europe well into the 1940s, and that there was both a housing shortage and poor-quality housing stock in the country during the first half of the 20th century. This also led to a wide range of promises about housing from political leaders across the spectrum, which also produced numerous governmental studies on housing and urban standards in the pursuit of best practices, including observational studies of housewives. Optimal dimensions for housing, along with furnishing plans and sunlight diagrams, were then published the series Good Housing (God bostad), with the standards required when builders used government loans. This was especially important during the so-called Million Program, which built over one million dwelling units across Sweden between 1965 and 1974, including five new neighborhoods in Södertälje, where I did my research. With this, the notion that erasing visual difference would support social equality became pervasive both rhetorically and materially.

What I then found during fieldwork was how that these ideas continued to resonate in contemporary planning practice. When I was working in the Södertälje planning department as an intern, the promotion of social equality through spatial standardization was reinforced all the time. I mention in the book how one planner told me, “There is not a single plan in the entire planning department that is not functionalist.” I found this statement extremely interesting because this planner recognized how little things had actually changed in his line of work since the mid-20th century. This was despite the fact that the Swedish political context had shifted radically since the 1980s with intensive neoliberal reforms and the widespread popularity of ideas like New Public Management within public professions and bureaucracies. Even with these changes, I repeatedly found that urban planners held on tightly to the notion that minority groups could only achieve social quality if they submitted to architectural standards. Planners even expressed a kind of moral panic when Syriacs distinguished themselves architectonically and when they explicitly sought to live together in enclaves.

For me, one of the most interesting expressions of these concerns had to do with the new private houses that Syriacs were building in the town and their choice of both form and materials. I write extensively in the book about how much anxiety resulted among planners when one deregulated plan for a new neighborhood produced a wide range of architectural forms commissioned by Syriacs: from houses in stucco to walls on the edge of the street to buildings where two stories looked like three. Planners talked mentioned this plan as a cautionary tale all the time. One time, I was talking with a majority Swedish planner in her 30s about her understandings of what a dream house was for Syriacs versus majority Swedes. She subscribed to the idea that most Swedes wanted a small wooden house in the traditional style with white window frames, while Syriacs preferred large houses in stone with columns. For her, it was a major professional issue that these dream houses could potentially be built side by side! She decried the impossibility of having “an area where everything matches” in a place where “gigantic stone houses with very grand columns” would coexist with smaller wood frame houses. She also told me that visitors might assume the wooden house to be a “construction barrack” rather than a private house, suggesting other anxieties bubbling below the surface of her comments. In her professional understanding, a plan that allowed this kind of formal, architectural difference would ultimately lead to that Swedish house being eclipsed visually (and culturally, it was implied) by its neighbor.

During fieldwork, I heard a lot of comments like hers, where choices about materials or even the design of the front yard appeared to serve as shorthand for concerns about migration and its effects on Swedish society more generally. Planning and architecture were frequently cited as tools to improve an imagined integration between minority Syriacs and majority Swedes, but the way that this would be enacted and the outcomes envisioned had not changed much from earlier methods to address differences between socioeconomic classes in early and mid-20th century Sweden. This is another reason that I wanted to call attention to the way majority Swedish planners were interacting with Syriac clients and interpreting the consequences of their building projects.

Lynda Chubak: Throughout your book you reveal how diaspora space is made material, having both intended and unintended consequences. For example, “Major monuments may unite the diaspora, but they also bifurcate the city.” (p. 131)  Over the last several months, across the United States and beyond, contestations over monuments have intensified. With these conflicts and your research in mind, what advice might you give to planning departments that are considering public monuments?

Jennifer Mack:Thanks for this question, which is very relevant in the present moment! And I think I would like to frame my response by expanding the definition of public monuments because, in my view, they can take many forms. They may be literal sculptural elements in the landscape, such as some of the monuments that you’re referring to in this question. Certainly, there can be explosive debates about projects like that when they make it down the pipeline to a planning department. For example, in Sweden, here have been controversial proposals to create monuments in suburban neighborhoods to the victims of the genocides in early 20th century Turkey, and one such monument was constructed in Botkyrka despite opposition that deemed the tragedy it represented as supposedly foreign to Sweden and thus out of place. This shows just how much emotion that monuments – which are not merely materials carved or cast – can elicit. I would like to suggest that we could also broaden the definition of a “monument” to include symbolic buildings that, for many diasporic groups, also serve as pilgrimage sites.

During my research for the book, I found that Syriac Orthodox churches and a soccer arena were not just gathering spaces for religious services and rituals and soccer matches but also critical symbols of settlement and success for the Syriacs who proposed and commissioned them. When Syriacs from abroad came to Södertälje, it was often to visit these sites – not just to join community members in their celebratory or solemn rites – but because of the status of these buildings as monuments. Intriguingly, both my historical research and in ethnographic research conducted in planning meetings about new churches (and in a later project, mosques), planners’ concerns often centered on two issues: 1) parking and noise levels during events; and 2) the social and spatial effects of these buildings on the neighborhoods and cities holistically. For these reasons, these emblematic, expensive, and often hard-won buildings typically ended up sited in peripheral locations, and very often these were even in industrial zones next to factories or other spaces with more mundane or pragmatic functions. In conversation, planners expressed their beliefs that this choice of location would reduce complaints about traffic and other disturbances associated with the projects, but it also placed the largest Syriac Orthodox Cathedral in Europe (at least the largest according to my interlocutors) in the middle of a block next to a factory and a chain link fence. Certainly, many Syriac interlocutors believed it was, as one man told me, better not “to be in the people’s eye,” and therefore desirable to be hidden in this way – to avoid conflict. But the results are tragic and exclusionary, too.

Based on my experiences in these settings, my advice to planning departments considering public monuments – especially those commissioned by minority groups – would therefore be to embrace these projects as evidence of societies in transformation and to give them prominence and the kinds of spaces that other similar majoritarian monuments would receive. Likewise, when planners reflect upon monuments from the past, it is important to understand how they relate to the society of the present. If a monument – such as those you might be referring to in the United States – represents oppression and racism, then it is also the duty of a planning department to consider its continued relevance as part of the public realm. So, monuments are indeed tricky when we think about issues of permanence, representation, political conflict, and belonging.

Goodwin and Cekaite on their book, Embodied Family Choreography

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Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity, 1st Edition (Hardback) book cover

https://www.routledge.com/Embodied-Family-Choreography-Practices-of-Control-Care-and-Mundane-Creativity/Goodwin-Cekaite/p/book/9781138633261

Interview by Yeon-Ju Bae

YJB: In arguing that the family as a social institution is achieved through intercorporeal co-ordination among family members in their lived and embodied everyday practice, you draw on data from middle-class US families and middle-class Swedish families. I was wondering about your motivation underlying the selection of these two populations. While you touch upon cultural difference when discussing general metadiscourses, you don’t seem to distinguish interactional data of each country throughout the analysis. If you are more concerned with the universal aspect of haptic sociality in family life, why did you choose the US and Sweden and what occurred as unexpected or interesting discoveries for you in examining these two countries?

MHG and AC: We will briefly outline the history of the project of Center for Everyday Lives of Families. Kathleen E. Christensen, Program director of the Workplace, Work Force and Working Families program funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, contacted Elinor Ochs to see if she would be interested in establishing a research group to study how middle class American families balance work and family. Elinor established an interdisciplinary group at UCLA and recommended that research collaborators be contacted at two other sites (Sweden and Italy), where there was also an established interest in documenting everyday family life through video recording. Karin Aronsson in Sweden and Clotilde Pontecorvo in Italy became partners in the endeavor. For the US sample some parents were first-generation Latin American, European, or Asian immigrants. Two of the thirty-two US families were headed by gay parents. Both parents in the US sample worked in professions ranging from dentistry, law, and medicine to education, social work, administration, and film dubbing.

We were interested in discovering characteristic features of family life as fully embodied, that is, as corporeal, and our focus and approach was inductive. As part of the inductive, discovery-based approach we outlined the recurrent practices of embodied family choreography in both cultural contexts – practices that in some ways are similar and in some ways vary. Portrayal of discovered similarities can provide an inspiring way of finding the common features of human sociality — the interest put forward by anthropologists such as Charles Goodwin (see for instance his book Co-operative Action, 2018) and Webb Keane on ethics and morality in Ethical Life, 2016. For instance, the interactional organization of hugs, as well as haptic shepherding, is found not only across our two data sets, but has been since documented in various studies on the use of touch in other cultural and institutional contexts as well. Concerning the differences, as mentioned above, we did not engage in an a priori comparative approach, but culturally specific features are pointed in our conclusion. There we discuss such issues as how children in Swedish middle class families are fostered into moral accountability through activity contracts, and how the directive sequences in Swedish data are formulated in a rather robust manner – starting with initial interrogatives and only later, upon noncompliance, are transformed into haptic shepherding. Such organization can be interpreted in terms of the child-orientedness of Swedish society, where children’s agency (and the possibility of making their own choices) is foregrounded. However, we can also see that compliance needs some persuasion, and embodied practices. While haptic shepherding is found in American directive sequences as well, the directive trajectories are not organized in the same way.

YJB: The attention of the book to simultaneous mutual monitoring as well as to sequential trajectories is compelling in studying emergent meaning-making among family members. At the same time, you argue that embodied adult-children and sibling interaction constitute family habitus (pp. 4, 250) and family ethos (pp. 19, 256) through inculcating socially accountable ways of bodily techniques (pp. 13, 258). I appreciate your point that emergent phenomenological experience is situated in and contributes to the broader social order. Would you elaborate more on your ideas about the investigation of everyday interactional processes of ethos and habitus?

MHG and AC: Shaping children as particular kinds of social inhabitants and actors in the family, that is as members who are responsible and accountable, involves “getting things done.” Directives provide the central locus for constituting local social order in the midst of managing or orchestrating routine tasks in the family (hygiene, cleaning, getting dressed, homework). Different choices among various directive and other communicative practices create different types of social actors, social organization and alignments. Negotiations in response to parental directives can take different forms and display a range of alternative sequencing patterns, resulting from factors such as the type of directive given, accounts or reasons given for the directive, and next moves to the directive, as well as the facing formations of participants and stances or affective alignments that participants maintain vis-à-vis one another. As often the activities parents propose are ones that children like to postpone, examination of directive/response trajectories allows us to see how children agentively and creatively orient themselves to a project, stalling and otherwise attempting to derail it, and parents’ responses to such maneuvers. Different types of moral actors are co-constructed through displays of reluctance and resistance, in contrast to willingness to carry out routine courses of action.

YJB: The book draws on video data in order to explore visual, aural, and haptic aspects of family interaction, and I liked the inclusion of drawings of the scenes and spectrograms of pitch and voice quality. For instance, it was fascinating to see the co-occurrence between hug and creaky voice (p. 150), and format tying not only in terms of morphosyntactic forms (p. 202) but also in terms of pitch (p. 88). While the family interaction as well as fieldwork experience is multisensory, the manifestation of data in a written form primarily relies on the visual channel. I was wondering what was particularly challenging during your research given the limitation on the data exposition.

MHG and AC: The process of analysis requires to attend to both the verbal modality, where various sensorial aspects (participants’ sensations) can be verbalized and articulated (‘your breath stinks’) and the visual. However, the interpretation of the emergent and detailed character of sensorial corporeal aspects of family choreography are also made possible by numerous and repeated viewings of video recordings. Interpretation of course also involves our own previous corporeal experiences. Visual representations helped us to provide a richer portrayal of embodied and spatial features of family encounters, and using many pictures which are integrated in the transcript (in the places where they occur in an interactional situation) is clearly an important way of presenting the reader with at least visual representations of haptic encounters. Taste smell are, however, not accessible.

YJB: While the book argues that family identity is not given but created through “doing family” (p. 257), the families examined are basically composed of adult parents and young children. It seems as if a certain ideological family image is already shared among western countries, and I was wondering why you chose this family type and this phase of family life in looking into the tension between control and care as well as that between ordinary routine and creative exploration. In other words, what kind of social conditions and cultural ideologies of family are represented in your study and why it was beneficial to focus on these families?

MHG and AC: Our multi-disciplinary project focused on how dual earner middle class families manage the complexities of daily life, balancing parenting and work in the US and in sister projects in Europe. The psychologists in the project wanted to investigate a specific age group with at least two children. They wanted at one child to be at least eight years old. The US study included families of a range of ethnicities and two families were headed by gay dad couples. In Sweden, the absolute majority of families are full-time dual-earner families, and this cultural context provides well-established cultural ideologies of equal parenting responsibilities, an institutionalized early childhood care system, and a strong focus on children’s agentive participatory rights in arenas of social life, including family. In the US, there is greater diversity in how parenting is achieved; some families make use of directive trajectories which display hierarchy and authoritative control by parents, while others verge on being permissive, with children being more in control. Simultaneously, our study shows the complexity of daily life in family and the amount of work and negotiations – with multiple embodied resources – in handling everyday, very mundane tasks.

YJB: The book illustrates how children are socialized to moral personhood through collaborative embodied interaction among family members in a choreographed or orchestrated manner. While the practitioners’ ideological emphasis on individualism and child-centeredness may encourage child agency, it seems to me as if the book’s theoretical approach may as well contribute to the depiction of children’s agentive role. Everyone participates in an on-going interaction as equal participants through mutual monitoring and mutual meaning-making, and can affect the unfolding of interactional trajectories. I wonder whether you think the mutual monitoring is something everyone does or everyone has to do. In other words, what kind of moral person is projected by the theoretical framework itself through the ways of public display of data analysis?

MGH and AC: Goffman (1972:63) defined the social situation as “an environment of mutual monitoring possibilities, anywhere within which an individual will find himself accessible to the naked senses of all others who are ‘present,’ and who find themselves accessible to him.” In other words he was concerned with general principles of any encounter: the interdependent organization of mutual intersecting consciousnesses, inhabiting unfolding time together with the lived experiential world. Mutual monitoring is distinctive from collaboration or being accountable.

As we state early on in the book (p. 19), our concern is with examining family life and children and parents as “mutual apprentices” in routine embodied practices through which they act in co-operation with one another, building the social worlds they inhabit. We examine the active contributions of both children and parents to practices of control, caring and mundane creativity in specific social contexts and conditions for development. We find that parents are learning from their children as much as children learn from parents.

 

Keith Murphy on his new book, Swedish Design

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

Interview by Ilana Gershon 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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