Tag Archives: Venezuela

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

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Interview by Ahona Palchoudhuri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahona Palchoudhuri: What is your next project about?

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

Juan Luis Rodríguez on his book, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta

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https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/language-and-revolutionary-magic-in-the-orinoco-delta-9781350115767/

Interview by Rusty Barrett

Rusty Barrett: First, for those unfamiliar with Venezuela, could you explain the term “revolutionary magic”?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: I first encountered the term revolutionary magic in one of Fernando Coronil’s interviews where he wondered whether the Bolivarian revolution would be a new iteration of what he called the magical state. Coronil argued back in the 1990s that Venezuela’s dependency on oil put the state in a mediating position between the social body of the nation and both its nature and international capital. This position made the Venezuelan state appear magical to Venezuelans because it had the possibility of carrying out grandiose projects of infrastructure and welfare policies with money that seemed to come from nowhere. The state, without taxing either its citizens or its industries, was in the position to undertake the process of making Venezuela a modern country. This magic, of course, has the downside of depending on the ups and downs of oil prices in the international market. When Chavez was elected to office in 1999, he took office at the end of a long period of economic crisis that extended from 1983 to the end of the1990s. After a few years in office, he found himself as the leader of a revolution (later he will call this turn socialism of the 21st century), and as the Venezuelan president that has managed the largest budget in the history of the country. Since roughly 2004 to the end of 2012 Venezuela received more money from oil exports than at any other time in its history. In this historical period Venezuela combined all the structural features of the magical state with all the utopian desires of a 21st century socialist. The term, revolutionary magic, then refers to the assemblages of performances, political ways of speaking, and infrastructural projects that emerge out of that combination of those factors. If the magic of the Venezuelan state in the 20th century produced a kind of modernity, in the 21st century this capacity was turned to construct a revolution. In both cases, modernity and revolution suffer from the same reliance on the state to scaffold rhetorical and performative apparatuses with an unreliable source of economic success.          

Rusty Barrett: Your work is clearly situated within the discourse-based approach to culture, why did you choose that particular framework? How does this approach address concerns beyond linguistic anthropology?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: I came to learn about discourse-centered approaches to culture during my grad school years studying under Jonathan Hill and Anthony K. Webster. I still remember how reading Jonathan’s work and going to seminar with Tony grounded my work on the idea that I should go after naturally occurring instances of language use emphasizing the centrality of performance and showcasing the complexity of what people say while we do fieldwork. This was very important to me because this is what methodologically separated my work from Coronil’s who rather had the methodological gaze of a historian. I wanted to understand Venezuelan political discourse and gift-giving in the context of the magic of the state (or magical state), but I wanted to do it by paying attention to how people get folded into actual contexts of linguistic interaction where they must engage in actual political speech. The distribution of state resources and the magic of the Bolivarian revolution produced actual instances of language use. I wanted to go after that. Discourse-centered approaches, especially the branch coming down from Joel Sherzer, have always been associated with verbal play, poetics, and performance, and rightly so. I hope that my book shows how discourse-centered approaches to culture can also shed light on questions of political economy, revolution, and modernity that are often not addressed from this perspective.

Rusty Barrett: Your book emphasizes issues of translation and transduction. How are those concepts important for understanding the place of the Warao in Venezuelan politics?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: Part of the transition from what Chavez called the fourth republic into the Bolivarian revolution was a change in the kind of relationships that state institutions, and the Catholic church, had with Indigenous communities. After 1958, when dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was deposed, Venezuelan political parties signed what was known as the Puntofijo pact and embraced representative democracy as a core ideological value. During this period, Indigenous peoples were regarded as potential constituents to be represented by appointed officials from the central government in Caracas. They were supposed to be integrated into Venezuela’s political and economic system, but that future was always imagined as a process of acculturation in which they become undifferentiated citizens who speak Spanish primarily. Their languages were supposed to disappear and, from the point of view of the State, it made sense to translate their oral traditions into Spanish making them cultural patrimony of the nation. In this way the ideals of representative democracy gave a specific directionality to the work of translation from Indigenous language to Spanish because the product of these texts was supposed to represent Indigenous peoples as future integrated citizens of a modern State. The work of the Magical State is to produce modernity, and during this period that meant pulling Indigenous peoples into the orbit of the state. The work of translation followed that logic.

This all changed with the arrival of Hugo Chávez to power. He opposed a new ideal of participatory democracy, and later socialism, to the previous ideology of political representation. This new ideology centered around the notion that people must have a degree of direct participation in the decision-making process and implementation of policies. This new ideological position was central to the writing of the new constitution in 1999. At the same time the circulation of texts and practices of translation was completely reversed. Indigenous peoples were now not supposed to be integrated as culturally and linguistically undifferentiated constituents who needed representation but as subjects who would keep these differences and participate in the democratic process themselves. The constitution, laws that affected Indigenous peoples’ lives, and the symbols of the nation, such as the national anthem, had to be translated into Indigenous languages. That reverted the flow of translation in the hope that it would give Indigenous peoples the knowledge and capacity to participate in the political life of the nation representing themselves in the process.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the Bolivarian revolution is how this process of political participation that seemed so good in paper never really took off. Instead, the nominal legal rights to participation have been contradicted with strategies of cooptation that allowed Chavez, and now Nicolas Maduro, to pose as if Indigenous peoples have achieved a degree of integration into the political decision-making process while in practices they marginalize and manipulate this participation. Indigenous peoples in Venezuela have recently faced a deterioration on the conditions of their voting rights as well as a brutal encroachment on their ancestral territories. The Bolivarian revolution has produced some of the most brutal ecological degradations in Indigenous territories through the so-called Arco Minero that only reproduces the logic of capitalist extraction that was supposed to be rejected with the arrival of the revolution.

This brings me to the place of transduction in my book. I understand transduction as the transformations, and assemblage, of signs across semiotic modalities. As I explain at the beginning of the book, the main process of transduction that I am interested in is the transformation of oil revenue into forms of political performances and political influence. Oil revenue support forms of political speech linked with ideologies of modernity and state control in Venezuela. My argument in the book is that despite the reversal on the flow of translations that correlated with a transition from representative to participatory democracy, the basic transduction of oil revenue into modernity and political control remained the same in both periods. In other words, despite rhetorical differences in ideological principles, Chavez’ revolution never really produced a systemic transformation in the structural conditions that marginalized Indigenous subjects in Venezuela. They might have more nominal rights now, but oil dependency still means those rights are principally rhetorical devices. The transduction of oil revenue into political performance and celebrated forms of modernity is an unstable structural condition subject to ups and downs of commodity markets and this means that the revolutionary gains in political participation can disappear at any moment.                      

Rusty Barrett: What aspects of your analysis do you feel are most useful for looking at the relationship between Indigenous communities and the state in places beyond Venezuela?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: I think my analysis is useful for understanding how the integration of Indigenous peoples into public political spheres–and the performative and communicative strategies used for that purpose–depend on kinds of ideological political project made possible by entire political-economic systems. The main goal of my book is to show how discourse-centered approaches to culture can help us accomplish that goal.

Another aspect of my analysis that I think can be useful is to bring attention to the ways in which State actors’ agendas and intentions do not determine the consequences of their actions. I tried to illustrate this point by bringing examples of political gift-giving which is in Venezuela stereotypically regarded as a form of political bribery, corruption, and coercion. I show how the gift per se does not accomplish any of this without further discursive engagement in the communities where is received. Likewise, promises of political gifts do not amount to simple deception since gift-giving and discourse form complex chains of interpretation in the Orinoco Delta. I hope these insights can served to inspire more ethnographic research into how these complex semiotic systems are developed under different political and economic conditions.   

Rusty Barrett: The book provides a language-based approach to understanding political gifts and campaign promises. In what ways do you see this approach as providing insights that might be overlooked by other approaches? What would you hope scholars in other fields take away from your analysis?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: What I would hope other researchers take away from my book is the necessity to see political gift-giving and speech as interrelated. The naturalness of the correlation between gift-giving and political influence that some researchers see in patron-client relationships do not occur without the mediation of a great deal of speech. Paying attention to these patterns allow us to understand how political influence through gift-giving and political promises is an interactional achievement that we cannot take for granted. I would hope that researchers interested in these kinds of questions will take a little more seriously the fact that naturally occurring instances of language use (discourse) provide not only frames for cultural interpretation but are, more importantly, embodied practices that make political gifts feel right or not in a particular social context. Paying attention to that relationship is central to how I study politics through the lens of a discourse-centered approach to culture.

Robert Samet on his book, Deadline

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https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo38871952.html

Interview by Alejandro Velasco

Alejandro Velasco: Venezuela is in the news these days, but that wasn’t always the case. For decades Venezuela seemed relatively understudied, considered “boring” and uneventful in contrast to the rest of the region. Then Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, and academic – and media – attention gradually took off. What drew you to study Venezuela, and the media in particular?

Robert Samet: Like many people, I was initially drawn by the grassroots political project that coalesced around Hugo Chávez, but it was the extraordinary media environment that made me choose to do fieldwork in Venezuela. Before graduate school I worked in advertising. My master’s thesis dealt with terrorism preparedness campaigns in the United States, something with which I had experience. For my doctoral research, I wanted to continue working on media and democracy but in a different setting. Venezuela was perfect. It was the most diverse and arguably the freest environment for journalism in the Western Hemisphere. It was also the most polarized. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the media battles playing out in Venezuela were a precursor to what has become the new normal in much of the world.

Alejandro Velasco: As you describe in rich and dynamic detail in Deadline, the media was an early, crucial, and sometimes even literal site of political struggle in the Chavez era, not just a flashpoint but a platform for chavistas and anti-chavistas to seek to impose deeply divergent visions of the country and gain control over its future.  But your book takes a surprising turn. It focuses on a specific subset of press coverage – crime beat reporting – that at first glance seems to stand outside the fray of the larger media battles that have shaped the Chavez era. Why did you decide to focus on crime reporting, and how do you think this specific focus sheds light on broader media struggles in contexts of bitter polarization?

Robert Samet: Crime journalism was not part of the original plan. I’d intended to do participant observation with media producers on either side of Venezuela’s political divide, but after a few weeks the research stalled. It wasn’t a problem of access. Most of the news organizations were happy to open their doors, and being a gringo from a prestigious U.S. university didn’t hurt. The problem was that people kept repeating stories I’d already heard. Either the private press was part of a vast anti-Chávez conspiracy (chavistas) or the Chávez government was a corrupt dictatorship intent on ending press freedom (opposition). Back and forth. I decided to start working with crime reporters because violent crime was an issue on which there was an emerging consensus. Focusing on crime allowed me to provincialize Chávez. I could see how reporters went about the business of finding cases, gathering facts, and framing stories. I also observed how they used crime stories as a platform to mobilize grievances, apportion blame, and propose solutions. A distinct pattern emerged. After a few months of working the Caracas crime beat, I started to see a broader logic that governed the practice of journalism in Venezuela.

Alejandro Velasco: Populism is much in vogue as an explanatory device but the term is fraught, seeming at times to mean everything and nothing. One common and contradictory trope is that the press is both a catalyst for and a bulwark against populist politicians who rely on media coverage – positive or negative – to attack freedoms and staid institutions. Your book offers a refreshing and important contribution, viewing “populism” less as a political phenomenon than as a category of analysis to understand fields of cultural and political contestation. How did you arrive at populism as a theoretical framework, and what do you think Deadline adds to debates on what populism is and isn’t?

Robert Samet: Thank you! I couldn’t agree more with your assessment. Populism is a term that is frequently misused. Much of the current scholarship has adopted a top-down definition that confuses populism with the discourse of charismatic leaders. That’s one of the reasons anthropologists have largely avoided the topic. I only turned to theories of populism because I was trying to explain the mobilization of “denuncias” (denunciations) by Venezuelan journalists. Denuncias are crucial for understanding the style of journalism that came to dominate Latin America in the late twentieth century. I expected to find a large literature on the topic, but there was virtually nothing on denuncias in English or in Spanish. I had to create my own theoretical framework. Around this time, I picked up Ernesto Laclau’s book On Populist Reason and found a lucid explanation of the practices I’d observed on the crime beat. Although I have issues with some of Laclau’s normative assumptions, his work allowed me to formulate an empirically grounded analysis of the role that media plays in populist mobilization, a topic on which Laclau himself is silent. In this regard, I think that my book can serve as a roadmap for thinking about the relationship between media and populism more broadly. Instead of starting with a check list of attributes by which to quantify the relative populism of different leaders (ala the work being done by “Team Populism”) we have to start with the grievances of ordinary people and the channels through which these grievances are mobilized.

Alejandro Velasco: Venezuela is one of the world’s most violent countries, even as you also observe, there is much debate about what precisely that means, with wildly divergent statistics often thoughtlessly tossed around in leading media accounts. That leads to an important meditation that runs through Deadline, about the meanings of violence beyond figures, but also and perhaps more importantly, about larger epistemological tensions in a world where not just policy making but most decision making and reporting about it is increasingly dominated by “hard” numbers.  As someone who is not an anthropologist I’m curious: what do you think a book like Deadline – and the discipline of anthropology more broadly – has to say about how the value of ethnography and qualitative methods at a time when these tools seem increasingly to be questioned as valid or important?

Robert Samet: I’m secretly fond of numbers and spent a lot of time pouring over crime statistics. Violent crime in Venezuela is exceptionally bad by any measure. Because it was a political flashpoint the numbers were weaponized. Organizations associated with the opposition often inflated the homicide rate, while the government went to great lengths to hide it. This is a pattern with which criminologists are familiar. The solution is not better numbers. It’s better context. That is what good ethnography and good journalism have in common. That is also one of the things my book provides—a nuanced, empathetic, and policy-relevant description about struggles to control perceptions of crime. However, ethnography is much more than mere context. It is a resolutely empirical methodology, one that is far better suited to studying moments of political and socio-economic upheaval than quantitative research. As I learned in my advertising days, quantitative data is great for predicting behaviors within a closed system, but it is not particularly useful if you want to understand how individuals or groups will react to something radically new. For that you need a methodology with a stronger grounding in peoples’ lifeworlds. To return to the subject of populism for a moment, data scientists were not the ones who foresaw the current wave of upheavals. It was scholars whose research was close to the ground and whose work had an ethnographic sensibility. For anyone who wants to understand where things are headed, I’d argue ethnography is more relevant than ever.

Alejandro Velasco: You write that fieldwork for what became Deadline began in 2007, continuing through multiple research visits of different length until just recently. That means you have witnessed Venezuela arguably at the height of chavismo’s popularity and power, through Chavez’s death, through Nicolas Maduro’s first years in power, and more recently, during the country’s dramatic economic collapse. As an ethnographer, what special challenges do you feel you’ve encountered researching and writing in such a fast-changing context? And based on your research and writing on Venezuela, what has surprised you – and what has failed to surprise you – about the turn the country has taken in recent years?

Robert Samet: So much has changed over the past decade. When I started out, Venezuela was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak world. Today it is in crisis. For an ethnographer, the speed of change definitely posed a challenge, but it was compounded by the political stakes. Ever since I started working in Venezuela, the situation has been misrepresented abroad. In the United States, for example, the GOP is using Venezuela as an example of the dangers of socialism, a move that even The New York Times flagged as baldly misleading. Back in 2007, it was easy to counter partisan assertions about dictatorship, censorship, or political persecution; fast forward to the present and it’s more difficult. Take the issue of crime control. Under Chávez, the Venezuelan government rejected tough-on-crime policies as instruments of racial and socio-economic oppression. Under Maduro, it has embraced them. Tough-on-crime policies have been the hallmark of rightwing populism since the 1980s, so it’s troubling to see an ostensibly leftist movement champion tactics similar to those we see in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro or the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte. I would not call Maduro’s punitive turn surprising—if anything, I was amazed that Chávez managed to hold out against pressure to move in this direction for so long—but it creates a real conundrum. How do you write honestly about a topic that has become the object of political football? As someone sympathetic to the plight of ordinary Venezuelans as well as the ideals of the Bolivarian Revolution, I’m acutely aware that my critiques could be used to justify brutal sanctions or to make a case for war. That’s what made this project so challenging. There is a very narrow tightrope that I’m trying to walk.

Alejandro Velasco: One of the more provocative contributions Deadline makes is identifying the multiple pressures beat reporters face in climates of intense of polarization, pressures that go well beyond a simple state versus independent media binary.  Instead you show how beat reporters are susceptible to both overt and subtle forms of manipulation by management, by colleagues and interlocutors caught up in the fray of polarization, and of course by larger political tensions as they affect daily life, the object of their reporting.  That seems to echo another recent book on the media in Chávez-era Venezuela (Naomi Schiller, Channeling the State, Duke 2018) by noting that debates about press freedom – in Venezuela and elsewhere – often miss power relations in the press itself, power relations that are compounded but also obscured when the dynamic becomes one that pits “the state” versus “the media.” What contribution do you want Deadline to make to debates about the role – and the power – of the press in society, and about how we should think about the relationship between state and the media, as seen through the eyes of beat reporters?

Robert Samet: Here in the United States we are slowly waking up to the fact that press freedom is not all it’s cracked up to be. The myth of press freedom obscures how corporate entities have been remaking the state in their image for the better part of a century. Nowhere was this vice grip on the media challenged more imaginatively than Venezuela. Deadline looks at how private interests shaped political speech. Channeling the State describes how grassroots media projects set out to democratize access to cultural production. I think that the two books are complimentary. They show, albeit from different angles, that the media is a platform on which state-making projects are staged. In this respect, Naomi and I both challenge anti-statist assumptions that became prevalent in the critical humanities and social sciences from the 1980s onward. I hope that my book encourages a new generation of students and activists to work to change the nation-state rather than formulating newer, ever more sophisticated critiques of it. Among other things, I want readers come away with a greater appreciation for limited government regulation of things like online hate speech or the circulation of deliberate falsehoods. In the United States, these have become the vehicles for white nationalism. It is time to shut them down.

Alejandro Velasco: The book is at once engagingly written and theoretically rich. It also is both deeply situated in the Venezuelan experience, while resonating loudly in debates that extend well beyond Venezuela – about the craft of journalism, the meanings of populism, the work and policy of urban policing. It also strikes me as a book that makes an overarching argument, but whose chapters can also stand alone. That’s all to say, I can see it adopted in many different courses and settings – from introductory courses in Latin American culture, to political theory courses, to public policy course in urban planning, to advanced journalism seminars, and more. Can you give advice on a few ways someone wanting to incorporate Deadline might teach it productively? Or perhaps a more difficult question: How would you teach your book to undergraduates?  Are there chapters that are particularly well suited to teach independently? If read in full, are there auxiliary materials you would pair with it?

Robert Samet: Thank you! I teach at a liberal arts college and I wanted to write an ethnography that was relevant to my colleagues but also accessible to undergraduates. You’re right to observe that Deadline is constructed around a central argument, however there are also chapters and sections that stand alone. For example, I’d recommend chapters 2-4 for anyone who wants a depiction of how the stigma of criminality is stamped on the urban poor. These are the book’s most accessible chapters and I think they are conducive to undergraduate teaching. For graduate instructors who are interested in the book’s theoretical contributions, chapters 5-8 probably hold the greatest appeal. This is where I take up theories of media, democracy, populism, and representations of violence. For someone trying to explain how the Venezuelan landscape changed over the last twenty years, then the book’s first two chapters and the conclusion are probably the most important. How would I teach it? I think that Deadline is best suited for unsettling received wisdom about Venezuela and the relationship between media and democracy. I’d introduce the book by having students look for examples of how Chávez and Venezuela are portrayed by the international press. Then, I’d have them watch Kim Barley and Donnacha O’Briain’s 2003 documentary The Revolution Will Not be Televised. After that I’d dive into the book itself. I think that it pairs particularly well with journalistic accounts of Venezuela, like Jon Lee Anderson’s “Slumlord” published in The New Yorker (2013) or Frontline’s “The Hugo Chávez Show” (2008). But I think that it’s even more interesting when you pair it with contemporary discussion of social media, fake news, and ideals of journalism. In my opinion, Deadline is the best available case study of how populism operates in and through the media. It avoids the hype about new media as well as the liberal handwringing about evils of populism. I want students to come away with a nuanced understanding of a pattern that is built into the very fabric of our democracies.