Why don’t more anthropologists work in pairs in the field?

By Tin Sum Ying

In 1967, Renato and Michelle Rosaldo travelled to the Philippines to conduct fieldwork on the Ilongot people of northern Luzon, investigating the history of local headhunting practices – a form of ritualised killing involving the taking of a victim’s head as a trophy. In trying to comprehend why men beheaded their enemies, Renato found insight in the idea of releasing liget, which Ilongot described as the feeling of intense rage experienced in bereavement. As he reflected, he initially struggled to grasp the concept of liget on an embodied level before experiencing a devastating loss of his own, which enabled him to identify with headhunting as a way to assert agency in the face of senseless tragedy (Rosaldo, 1993). In contrast, Shelly interpreted headhunting as an activity to allow young men to assert themselves in Ilongot society and achieve a ‘completed’ adult status, framing it as a “form of generativity that is both social and concrete […] born in a youth’s desire to equal peers and reach their elders” (Rosaldo, 1980). These two interpretations invoked different theoretical traditions – one personal, subjective and self-analytical, the other focused on the social functions of status and prestige – yet which approach was more correct? Or is there value in holding both simultaneously?

Two anthropologists, two perspectives, one fieldsite; and yet this kind of dual fieldwork remains rare. Anthropological inquiry has long been built on the ideal of the solitary ethnographer, the privileged, isolated researcher who embeds themselves into a social context and emerges as an authoritative expert. Even as Malinowski established participant observation as the foundational model of anthropological enquiry, critiquing earlier ‘armchair anthropologists’ who theorised about distant cultures without direct engagement, he nonetheless took for granted their individualist approach to research. In the Malinowskian paradigm, a single ethnographer would enter the field with a bag of methodological and theoretical tricks to transform people’s narratives, experiences, performances and intimacies into a piece of research; this scientific approach to grasping the native’s point of view expects interlocutors to ‘open up’ and articulate their worldviews, beliefs and practices to the anthropologist, who assumes the role of the authority who validates, analyses and gives meaning to their confessions. As Rosaldo critiques, “The Sacred Bundle the Lone Ethnographer handed his successors includes a complicity with imperialism, a commitment to objectivism, and a belief in monumentalism […] and a strict division of labour between the ‘detached’ ethnographer and ‘his native’” (Rosaldo, 1993). In this paradigm, ‘anthropological knowledge’ is situated within a framework of control, where explanation and articulation form mechanisms of power.

 Yet even as anthropology has moved away from an unquestioning adherence to naïve realism, recognising the arrogance implied in the ethnographer’s assumed authority to “explain the other”, the persistent reliance on individual research reflects a continued romanticisation of the ‘lone ethnographer’ figure. While the postmodern crisis of representation forced anthropologists to acknowledge that ethnographic research involves constructing partial, situated truths rather than uncovering an ‘objective reality’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), there remains a sense that the discipline’s critical turn is enmeshed in the same power dynamics it critiques. An idealisation of epistemological individualism means that the modern anthropologist risks being trapped in a form of ‘hyper-reflexivity’ that emphasises the externalisation of positionalities, identities and desires, reflecting on how they might affect research without offering truly counterbalancing perspectives. In the era of self-scrutiny and confession, the ethnographic encounter becomes a mere performance of self-awareness. It is perhaps ironic that while anthropology has long aimed to critique and challenge Western intellectual traditions, it nevertheless upholds the myth of the fieldworker as “maverick and individualist”(Sanjeck, 1990), glorifying novelty and individual brilliance while dismissing collaboration and pathologising overlapping research interests.

And ethical critiques aside, while ethnographic individualism and subjectivity should be valorised for fostering the rich, personalised insights crucial to anthropological knowledge-making, they also introduce pragmatic issues regarding accountability, rigour and transparency. It is near-impossible to externally verify all aspects of conducted research – even with supervisor oversight – particularly as ethical procedures require falsifying the names and details of key settings and interlocutors (as seen in the controversy around works like Alice Goffman’s On the Run). Again, the system depends on trust and the privileged position of the single anthropologist for generating truth.

What possibilities could arise if we abandoned the lone ethnographer model? To propose a thought experiment, I imagine embedding two semi-independent researchers in the same fieldsite, not to validate each other’s findings but to intentionally observe and cultivate different approaches. This is not quite the same as the practice of a second anthropologist revisiting a site of past research, such as Kathleen Gough’s re-analysis of The Nuer, though of course such analyses play a crucial role in situating and updating anthropology within ongoing discourse. As I conceive it, a ‘parallel’ approach would begin with some shared research interests and questions but subsequently allow researchers the freedom to pursue divergent trajectories, where the aim would not be to reinforce a single interpretation of ‘truth’ but to explore how different perspectives might evolve in contrast. This would make explicit anthropology’s constructed nature, highlighting that subjective and partial knowledge is a key feature – and strength – of the discipline. Given that ethnography deliberately refuses preconceived hypotheses, such an approach would foreground how meaning is shaped by the confluence of what interlocutors and individual academics find significant in the field.

A parallel approach would also serve as a ‘counterfactual case’, shifting reflexivity from a mere intellectual acknowledgement of biases to something tangible and relational. By embracing epistemological multiplicity and discursive thought, we could simultaneously engage explicitly with positionality while increasing trust and lowering the risk of falsification. And beyond the methodological implications, this model could potentially inspire innovative forms of ethnographic writing, where juxtaposed accounts could highlight contradictions and real-time debates between researchers. Rather than ‘collaboration’ in the conventional sense, a ‘dialogue of divergence’ would stress the conflicts and unresolved tensions inherent in interpretation, raising the question of, what if the ideas we produce are irreconcilable? (and isn’t that exciting)?

Of course, this approach does not dissolve the hierarchies between anthropologists and interlocutors but instead keeps the anthropologist-as-interpreter structure intact. Yet I hold that such internal contestation introduces a different kind of destabilisation, one that directly challenges the solitary anthropologist’s epistemological authority and forces us to confess that ‘ethnographic truth’ is multiple. Rather than curating an “opacity”, which, to me, continues to privilege the anthropologist as the arbiter of what is revealed and concealed, embracing partiality and productive unknowability could generate a kind of radical transparency.

If this proposal is theoretically vague, that is because I am not entirely convinced that it could work in practice. Anthropological partnerships, where they do occur, often emerge for deeply personal reasons (most commonly because the researchers are married, given the extended amounts of time spent in the field); purposefully maintaining a working partnership in the field might be more challenging. Introducing a second semi-independent fieldworker would also introduce additional complexities, not least the issue of ‘funding overlap’ in an ideological system that prioritises originality as the key measure of the value of knowledge. There is also the question of authorship: how would researchers account for their partner’s contributions in a framework of intellectual property that fails to accommodate the inherently social and fluid nature of knowledge production?

And that is not to say there are no methodological benefits to solitude. Instead of reinforcing power dynamics, working alone can be a way of cultivating vulnerability – as successful research is contingent on the generosity, hospitality and emotional investment of interlocutors, a solo ethnographer may enable deeper engagement precisely by appearing more approachable and ‘in need of care’. The introduction of a second ethnographer could disrupt this, potentially reinforcing a sense of distance or self-sufficiency. But this, too, could be worth investigating; studying how the presence of multiple researchers shapes the field itself could offer valuable insight into the relational nature of ethnographic immersion. 

I can’t claim to have any definitive answers – I am simply proposing a thought experiment, one which I hope is exciting and enriching to think about. As opposed to simply assuming that ‘two perspectives are better than one’, this could be a stimulating way of experimenting with partial truths, immersion and vulnerability, and a method of externalising core theoretical debates. Perhaps the real question isn’t why don’t anthropologists work in pairs? but rather, why do we still valorise the individual ethnographic gaze in a discipline that claims to embrace multiplicity and polyvocality?

Note to actual anthropologists – if you’re reading this, please let me know where I’m wrong (in particular, I have no idea how collaboration between anthropologists and research assistants actually works)! I fully acknowledge that it’s a bit presumptuous for me to write this as a second-year anthropology student with no fieldwork experience, so I would be very grateful to hear any insights and critiques.

Bibliography:

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, Calif. ; London: University Of California Press.

Rosaldo, M.Z. (1980). Knowledge and passion : Ilongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Rosaldo, R. (2014). Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage. The Day of Shelly’s Death, pp.117–138. doi:https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376736-003.

Sanjek, R. (1990). Fieldnotes : the Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

In Conversation with Neil Armstrong

Interviewed and edited by Gloria Bhiziki and Elise Lee following Dr Neil Armstrong’s Friday Seminar on  'What Does Anthropology Have to Offer Mental Health Research?”

Neil is a member of SOAS’s Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (2022).

Elise: We’ve been reading a book by Langlitz (2012) in one of our courses, Mind and Society. Pointing out problems of biomedical randomised experiments, the book suggests instead a biocultural model that considers individuals' cultural backgrounds. Instead of the neuroscientific biochemical model, should we have biopsychosocial experiments that account for individuals' social and cultural backgrounds?

Neil: I suppose you’re asking if it’s possible and preferable. It’s possible to do a randomised control trial (RCT) of an intervention that took the social and the culture seriously. Already, even mainstream RCTs control what they think of as demographic information, so it could be an extension of that. I don't see why not, but broadly there are also limitations of RCTs. It’s not so much whether interventions play out differently for different sorts of people but also whether you even should be using different sorts of outcome measures. Normally, we've got a standardised intervention that your standardised outcome measures, so the data can be somewhat comparable. If you want to take cultural differences seriously, you might want a different kind of intervention with a different group and a different way of understanding the outcomes of different groups. If that were the case, you might want to enhance the way you think about demographic populations, but the endpoint might be more radical than that.

Gloria: In addition to that question in the book, neurosciences seem to be somewhat obsessed with schizophrenia as the epitome of psychosis. Why do you think that is?

But that's kind of fading now, you say the book’s 2012. For a while, they were super excited because people diagnosed with schizophrenia were seen as being in a sense the most “mad” (I know that's not the perfect way of putting it), but I think it's been a shift now partially because that research didn't lead to anything particularly new. 

Gloria: Yes, a lot of research in the book didn’t lead to anything. 

There are atypical antipsychotics like olanzapine that are broadly the same as the antipsychotics that they replaced. They may be preferable in some respects but basically, no one came up with much so far. I think there's been a shift towards things like neurodiversity. This is a business they're trying to charge; you’re doing loads of research on a new product or problem because this is a business. There's been a move towards people who are, let’s just say, not as distressed. A lot of people with schizophrenia are not holding down full-time employment and sometimes go through very difficult situations; but if you have different sorts of populations–let's just say you are functional and are earning lots of money–you might have nonetheless become a potential new market for new kind of treatment, that might be “exciting”. I know a lot of psychiatrists are quite sceptical about some of the categories now popular in research like ADHD, neurodiversity, this sort of thing. People feel that sometimes there's an increasing bias in research towards less serious middle-class things.

Elise: In consideration of bureaucratic surveillance, do you think psychiatric hospitals still have a place in the treatment of mental illness, particularly due to the history of asylums, eugenics and ableism?

Yeah, I do actually. I think that sometimes people go “mad”. A lot of my friends and myself too used to be a service user in hospitals several times. Sometimes it's not a bad idea in my view. The word “coercion” is probably overused sometimes. A friend of mine, who kept being admitted to the local mental hospital, was all over the place. At that point, he couldn’t look after himself and was gripped by preoccupations. It's okay to, and he would say the same thing, it was helpful. That's not to say what happens in those hospitals is ideal but I’m not against the idea of compulsory treatment sometimes for some people.

Elise: Considering that you say compulsory treatment or mental health hospitals are useful for some people, then how could we address their problems?  

I think partially what we ought to do is think about ward cultures. We're starting on some research at the Centre about this now. You can create wards that are more compassionate, open to distress, and humane, but less pathologising. I think that if staff didn’t have to spend a lot of time tick-boxing and producing notes, they might talk to patients a bit more, but I don’t think that’s the whole solution. You may have to change how their jobs are structured, the risk culture and who’s accountable for what, so they can have more time for informal ad-hoc connections. I also think to some extent what we at the moment expect professional services to deliver might be better thought of as something people could do themselves. I’m involved with service user organisations which is not so much like, “Here's a distressed person who needs to be cared for,” but more like, “Here's a group of people who are facing distress in various kinds of ways who might be able to understand and help each other,” which I think is often better. One of the worst things that can happen to someone if they're a long-term service user is that they are always a recipient of care, they have nothing to offer. Those people walk around having a sense that “I’m a problem that needs to be fixed” but in fact, I get to know people like this who can also support others and listen in a way that clinicians are not good at. If we could create institutional conditions, you might need professionals too, but it might just be that some of the things we want to do in a clinical ward might in future be done in patients-run organisations.

Gloria: You point out how people tend to feel they are the problem that needs to be immediately fixed by the system. But, there’s an opposite of that kind, where we use a biological explanation that removes responsibility for and externalises the harm from you. It’s like, “Oh, this is just how I’m built” and results in the desire to use medicine to treat it. I think we do need a balance.

Yeah, I’m totally with you there. Sometimes people’s absolution of saying, “My brain’s circuitry is faulty and there’s nothing I can do,” may undermine people’s agency. Sometimes people want to be told, “None of this is your fault, none of this is even about you, and this just happens to you.” One of the drivers for highly bureaucratised and highly biological care is not just structures, it’s also where people experiencing distress want to be innocent victims of injustice as if their neurocircuitry is being visited by aliens. Of course, you need to be compassionate, you need to see how people are often going through adversity, people experience trauma or difficulties often in early life, but still, you have agency. I think trying to develop that sense of agency is helpful. A psychiatrist can’t say something inappropriate like “You should get your act together” to a patient, but I have been a patient, among friends, we trust each other, and it might be helpful. 

Gloria: You mentioned aliens and that reminds me of another book we did for this course. Lepselter (2016) looks at UFO abductees. They kind of control the situation by suggesting there’s an apocalypse coming and they remove responsibility for the situations they are in, not only from themselves, but also place it on the state. I guess we do need a balance where you also consider helping yourself. They do build communities, but in a negative way where the world is ending.

Interesting. A friend of mine works with a group of UFO believers and a lot of them have been abducted. He feels that it can become very harmful to people as they become very preoccupied. On the other hand, maybe we all want to be abducted a bit. There are days when I won't mind being abducted for days or weeks. You could see drinking and drugging as a kind of abduction, waking up not knowing what exactly happened last night. I like the poet John Burnside, he had a massive drink and drug thing going on and he would sometimes write incredibly beautifully about it all. He had been “abducted” by alcohol perhaps.

Elise: How does place-making differ between psychiatric wards, rehabilitation centres, mental health institutions, and labs where researchers conduct experiments for the neuropharmaceutical industry? Gloria:  It’s the place where the researchers conduct experiments on rats and mice in comparison to the place where it is put into practice in psychiatric wards. How are these places made and why are they so different although they influence the same kind of industry? 

When I speak to researchers whether in bench or clinical studies, they often don’t directly see chosen patients and are unaware of what it’s like to be a front-line clinician. A lot of front-line clinicians don’t read the research because they just think these researchers don’t know. It’s annoying because sometimes high-end research people were once psychiatrists who saw more patients but they've advanced by publishing a lot of research rather than by helping more with the front line because of how career structures work. In mental health, treatment success isn't highly measurable. No one talks like, “This psychiatrist, his patients all get away, he’s amazing”. Likewise, in a way nobody says their work becomes widely respected, people may say it has been adopted by hospital managers and made into policy, but that’s slightly different. So, the links are quite loose between sitting in an NHS clinic and some guy doing some work on rats.

Elise: Following up on place-making, what kind of bureaucratic processes are required to make these spaces? Are there bureaucracies behind buying the furniture, installing different windows and painting the walls in psychiatric wards?

There are, but they're not standardised. At least for NHS trusts, they're quite separate, they do things like that variously. I find a lot of patient art in psych hospitals patronising; they are selected patients' paintings, and of course, they’re not pictures of psychiatrists mistreating people. Maybe a room like this (an LSE classroom) is created by bureaucracy. Maybe a committee made all the decisions to decorate it, but it’s probably maintained by different disconnected teams, like cleaners and the IT people. Nobody is ultimately responsible, the ultimate responsible person may be quite separated from those people who touch it.

Elise: Do you think how the place is made will influence the experiences of service users?

Yes. I think you can design for surveillance, for example, some of the older hospitals have very long corridors. They are not necessarily great for creating circumstances that make it easy for patients to informally interact in spontaneous ways, but you can alternatively design for this too. In the psych wards, there are often thoughts about security. I have to say the idea that someone watching you doesn’t necessarily make you as a patient feel annoyed because some wards can have an atmosphere where other patients can be scary; sometimes patients don’t think of each other as comrades.

Gloria: In consideration of people publishing articles and acknowledging one person contributing to it, I guess that’s like how science works, demystifies itself and doesn’t want to change the entire system. It also goes back to nobody responsible for anything.

No (agreeing). If you want to think about what might be the change in healthcare, you might want to have the moment, like “hang on a moment, psychosis might be one form of healing that might not need to be treated, or maybe bipolar disorder is habitus”. You might want to work with their tastes, values and commitments rather than treating them as victims of having a faulty brain. It might be a matter of, first, speaking to senior clinicians who might start to change policy, but it needs either interventions or institutional change and that's quite a long process. It requires us to yet follow through on all things, not just having a nice idea that we can discuss in a seminar with people. It's like NHS bosses don't know what people say in LSE seminars or any other seminars. 

Elise: Laura Bear, who is teaching us the course is also involved in the Centre at SOAS. You mentioned how university seminars obviously won’t have any direct effect on anything, what may the Centre do then?

We hope the things we do will bridge the gap between the interesting ideas and actual lived experiences of mental healthcare. Some of that is collaborating with other researchers to introduce ethnographic methods into what they're already doing. Let's say you have a group of people within the NHS who are trying out a new kind of treatment. To show the full benefits of the innovative treatment style, you might need to have that kind of subtlety and flexibility of ethnography. If they build into our analysis, then we might change the things that we judge as being a success or a failure. We're also trying to produce some kind of training for peer support workers. The NHS now employs a lot of people with lived experience of distress and they are backed differently in different trusts but they are a part of care. The problem is that lived experience is one thing, but it's in a sense not a form of expertise, so the tricky thing is sometimes I can see situations where a lived-experience person says, “I have this experience”, but the clinicians feel, “I have loads of patients why do I care about this one?” What I think anthropology can offer is that this one person is a way of theorising so that the systematic and the rigorous start to view it as valid data rather than just a personal anecdote. We’re developing the training now and we hope to deliver them next year. In that case, we think simply having some anthropological training could lead to changes in the balance of power and discussion. 

Elise: The anthropological training is to the peer supporters, right?

Yes, perhaps we will teach them re-theorising experiences. They had training, but we think a lot of the training was for them to anticipate a medical response to distress. We're not saying it’s wrong, but we’re saying there might be other frames too. In particular, their lived experience may not have translated very well into a medical model. It might be much easier to articulate your own experience if you have access to theoretical resources.

Gloria:  There was a piece of work of yours on “public silliness”. Do you think we have to increase the aspect of play not only in universities but also in general life? (See our last article: In Conversation with the Teaching Creativity Team)

Yes. One of the things I've found sad is how extremely humourless a lot of mental health care is. I think humour is such a part of surviving the less fun bits of life, and I regret it's not just part of more daily life. We’re doing the silliness workshops. So much mental health is about things like self-monitoring and self-management–planning, taking time off, being kind to yourself, working out what you can and can't do. I'm not saying there’s anything wrong with that but that can lead to a very buffered individualistic kind of sense. I think people need connections, and I don’t think you self-manage your way into connections. I think actually you often need to stop thinking. There are various ways to stop thinking but in our social workshops, we’re doing it in a very safe way. People mock a bit, they're facilitated, thinking in quite a skilful way, just by being spontaneous, playful, non-competitive, not worrying too much about what it’ll look like in pictures tomorrow, relax a little bit, and get over themselves a little bit. 

Gloria: There’s the narrative that the 90s is the “decade of the brain”, said President George Bush, do you think any decade is or could be the “decade of mental health”?

I hope not. It feels like it's just more and more predominant in universities and broadly in life. It’s not that all mental health care is bad or counterproductive. I don't want to tear everything down, but I think often we do better by thinking about it in non-medical terms like “loneliness” and the best way to generate community is not to think it's a mental health disorder. Say, I've got some students who seem to be impervious to loneliness but they’re not the healthy ones to me whereas the people who say “I feel lonely” to me know in their mind that there isn't enough community in their world and they feel the adverse effects of it– that's not pathology; the pathologist is outside of them, it's not in them. I think treating it as a mental health thing just seems to me to be the wrong way to go about it and I feel like quite a lot of forms of distress are like this. I think we're too quick to pathologise and medicalise. 

Elise: When you mention “pathologising”, do you mean something like imposing labels and categories on people of different kinds of mental disorders like “bipolar”? It’s like if you’re labelled, you feel the need to fit into that label, and there’s a looping effect. Do you think these labels and categories are still useful? Earlier, we talked about how compulsory treatments in psychiatric wards might still be useful for certain people despite their problems.

Yes, but to some extent it's not for me to say whether the terms are useful because I'm not a psychiatrist, a psychologist or a nurse. I sense that the problem is more that the institution can only read those categories and I would like institutions to read other categories too. At the moment, most hospitals just organise around the medical bureaucratic categories, which seems problematic; they can be narrow and reductive, but maybe the category is useful anyway. I think some people seem to experience distress which perhaps goes beyond what you might expect even knowing things about their backgrounds, networks, social situations and context. Maybe there’s something that might have to do with the brain or the gut– I don't see why one would close the door there. I don't think the existing categories are likely to be durable, they’re constantly evolving. In a way, not only anthropologists, but most clinicians I know are already thinking that. For the most part, there isn’t a wrong thing called “schizophrenia”, there isn’t a wrong thing called “bipolar”. Maybe the diagnosed categories attached to the treatments continue to be helpful in mental health care, I don’t see why not.

Elise: It seems that there is a paradox that when you want to care about people who are distressed or lonely, there’s always a risk of pathologising everything and turning it into a crisis, like the “mental health crisis”, then it may be problematic.

Yes. I think not everything we’re doing is working. There’s never been so much mental health care. When I was an undergraduate, there was hardly any mental health care for students but I don’t think we were super depressed or anxious, to some extent, I think maybe we were happier, partially because we were less serious. I think we’ve been more exposed to more psychology which may be individuating, problematising and pathologising. It seems to me that psychological assumptions and ways of thinking are permeating into schooling in a way that I think can be potentially harmful. In the meantime, a lot of the interventions are not effective.

Gloria: I feel like the hyper-awareness of everybody being connected and constantly perceived also pathologised everything.

You guys are living in this world where everything is documented. There’s no forgiveness. I think of it almost in theological terms like you are living in a religion where there is no forgiveness whereas for us we could have committed all sorts of indiscretions and there is no record. It’s not just a way of enabling some kind of moral misbehaviour, it's also not having to think so much about how things look to other people. We were just able to be spontaneous, like in our silliness workshops. There are no accounts, it’s temporary, and we’re playing. Now, everything is documented and there’s a problem there. 

Bibliography

Langlitz, N. 2012. Neuropsychedelia: the revival of hallucinogen research since the decade of the brain. University Of California Press.

Lepselter, S. 2016. Resonance of unseen things. University Of Michigan Press.

SOAS 2022. Dr Neil Armstrong. SOAS (available on-line: https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/neil-armstrong, accessed 26 January 2025).

‘I think we’re all together here, on the ward’ - A Personal Reflection on Sarah Pinto’s Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India

By Maite Ramos

In mid-October of last year, I read a monograph by Sarah Pinto Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India, which grapples with themes of agency, gender, medicine, and madness in the female psychiatric wards of North India. The author focuses on two wards in particular. Firstly, Moksha, which is a rural institution that often treated women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and frequently suffered from lack of funding and oversight. The other is the female wing of the Nehru Government Hospital, which serviced an enormous number of urban women around New Delhi. While different in many ways, both units frequently relied on diagnoses of female hysteria or related disorders like spirit possession to explain the complex and disturbing symptoms women presented with. Pinto teases out threads of kinship and love and their relationship to North Indian psychiatric patients struggling to find their way through the ups and downs of their lives. As a middle class American, I was taken aback at how deeply my own teenage experiences of psychiatric care in the U.S. parallelled Pinto’s  stories.  

When I was 14 years old, I was institutionalized for the first time. I was suffering deeply, and the language typically used to describe my experience - of sadness, isolation, fear, and self-consciousness, - did not accurately describe the somatic pain that radiated through my body and life. I struggled then with feelings of the madness that is being a teenage girl; of being in a body that I did not understand, of being expected to behave in a way I felt I could not achieve. I was also reconciling with the truth of systemic childhood abuse, which plunged me head-first into a crisis of the meaning of care. This challenged  normative ideas about kinship, and questioned the separability of the care I had received from the abuse I survived. I was falling deeply into the harmful coping mechanisms common amongst teenage girls, such as Anorexia and self-harm. I felt a pernicious panic that I was losing control, but also a savage relief in becoming unmanageable and disfigured. I listened to music full of rage and pain at such a high volume my ears hurt, I restricted my body until it became almost fully under my control, I exploded my pain out into my circle of similarly suffering friends, and I started to know my new sexual body as something uncanny and distressing.                                                                       

As I began to visibly deteriorate, the choice was made to put me in a psychiatric ward. I was admitted in mid-November after muddily describing what I was going through to my dad, in what I thought to some degree was a deathbed confession. First, I was taken to the emergency room. I waited with my dad in the sterile waiting room. I felt relief, anger, and fear. After a day in a hospital bed, hooked up to an uncomfortably cool IV, witnessing my body probed and recorded by others, we were told that I would be transferred to a state-run inpatient girl's ward. My phonewas taken, I said goodbye to my dad, and was loaded into the back of the cop car in paper scrubs adorned with handcuffs and shackles. The dehumanization of this moment set the tone for the rest of my experience with the American psychiatric institution

 The first night at the girl’s ward was desolate. The next 11 days are blurry in my mind, filled with endless gaps of nothingness and acute moments of agony. I was kept in scrubs for three days while my clothes went through rigorous sanitizing and inspection. I only met with a psychiatrist once, in a cold room with two chairs and nothing else. The other patients and I had meals three times a day, medication handouts twice a day, and “group meeting” for an hour a day. Other than that, we were pooled together in the common room with activities one might find in a Kindergarten. What I remember most was the other woebegone teenage girls; us sitting in tight circles coloring in children's coloring book pages with magic markers; us swapping stories and mementos; us trading socks for extra blankets or smuggling our phone numbers to each other or using the knotted bundles as the only token of love and hope we were still allowed. I remember walking in silent lines to the cafeteria, I remember the fantasies we had of romance and rescue. I remember the heartbreak of a daily phone call hour, when most of us cried and asked to go home. I remember one girl, about my age, named Kelsey, who called her estranged mother to speak to her toddler who had been put under her mother’s care by CPS (Child Protective Services). Kelsey had already been to this ward three times before.

This  experience defined the next decade of my life, both privately and publicly. I was institutionalized three more times after that, the last was for 11 months during my sophomore year of high school. However, I don’t think the consequential admissions left as vivid of a stamp on my life as the  first psychiatric ward. It shaped how I viewed myself as a subject, the  kind of agency I had, the kinds of  places I was allowed, and what would happen to me if I was deemed truly mad.  I learnt how much power there is in the love and connection that happens in solidarity with other women who are deemed broken. I thought, perhaps naively, that this was some bond I shared with only the people who sat in those circles with me.

While many of our contextual realities may have differed from the patients of Moksha or Nehru on the surface, in that dark, carpeted community space we too were struggling with control, abandonment, care, love, and kinship. We were desperately seeking a place where we fit at the fraying edge of relationships and institutions, where we fit within our own bodies that we had  been told are sick. We, too, negotiated truth and agency with the medical system, our families, and each other. We knew that the reason we were there was largely because there was no other place to put us; many of us were already involved with other institutions like CPS or the carceral system. In this way my psych ward mirrored Moksha, which upheld the normative gender and kinship structures for those women who were failing to fit within their bounds. However, we had the added nuance of being legally unable to make decisions for ourselves due to  our age. Our  agency was mitigated by the fact that we were children who were not to be trusted with the assumption of truth or legal rights to determine the kind of care we wanted or needed. The American conception of hyper-independence also bleeds through my experience of care, whereas the residents in Moksha and Nehru were often steeped in a deep sense of community and kinship which perforated the boundary of medicalization – for better or for worse.      

The most consequential difference between us and Moksha was that our situation was explicitly temporary. Most of us were only there for the minimum hold period for psychiatric cases, during which you were deemed a threat to yourself or others (for minors, this was 10 days). Some filtered in and out of the ward, adding sporadic time to their cumulative weeks in psych wards. This element of never-ending transition added something frenetic to all of our negotiations, that seemingly many residents of Moksha gave up after a time and languished into acceptance or lethargy. We often fretted about the stress at home and returning to it, while simultaneously aching for the freedom of being in the real world again.

An odd but significant detail is that we could not see outside - all the windows were frosted. This  elevated isolation and imposition of control was unfamiliar and hostile. It exacerbated the symptoms which had brought us here in the first place. However, many of us with non-psychotic symptoms became ‘manipulative’, a word that I have a deep repulsion and hurt feelings towards. To my ear, it is a biased word, laden with assumptions about morality, and often steeped in sexual connotations when used towards women.  Perhaps this stems  from Freudian understandings of hysteria and the later disarticulation of Freudian women’s motives and illnesses. What I wish to say in my defense to accusations of manipulation is as follows. : In my experience, when all that you can use to communicate is your symptoms, because your agency is negated by your illness, as Pinto describes in both Moksha and Nehru, you will try to find a way - consciously or subconsciously - to achieve your goals  by "using” your symptoms.   

Needless to say, it unsettles me to read this notion of manipulation in accounts of mental illness. One one hand because the word itself is riddled with shame and stigma, but on the other  because it feels uncomfortably like pathologizing a natural human trait we all regularly participate in throughout our lives. It certainly has its merits as a defined symptom in particular diagnoses, such as Narcissism or Sociopathy, but in the context of Moksha and my own psychiatric experience I find it places the sufferer within an impossible task of both behaving ‘normally,’ while also submitting themselves wholly to the agency and naming of other people. Other people determine your level of sanity - often  ensnaring you in the confines of diagnostic criteria - but when you are not playing by the rules of insanity the way you ought to, you are given the double stigma of manipulating your own illness in order to achieve something most likely impossible in a clinical psychiatric setting: freedom and agency. The language of mental illness is a never ending losing hand as a patient; everything you are depends on how you can appear to others - and as a student of critical feminist theory I am obligated to note that this is mostly professional men - regardless of whether or not you are actively in control of your appearance of sanity or insanity.        

Despite this, I cannot fully dismiss the necessity of control as care. Care as an imposition of normative behavior and values; care as removal from the ‘real world’ that was bleeding us dry. Many of us could not even define the kind of care we wanted or knew what kind of care was healthy. However, we could describe abandonment and what it felt like to be dumped. We struggled, like the women of Moksha, with the blurring of care and abandonment and how it felt to be controlled and also left to the judgment of people who did not feel any attachment to us. It was both dehumanizing and a relief to become a chart instead of a person, which I would argue occupies a large space in abandonment. To some degree, abandonment in my context was a release of the things that both constrain and punish you, and make you a person. Even now, I doubt I could create a comprehensive system of care for myself encompassing everything that is good and healing for me in my worst moments when breaking from sane behavior.  I challenge anyone to do the same. So, I struggle to invest full-heartedly in any ‘empirical’ or ‘objective’ way to create care for all based on a universal diagnosis. Care is messy and ugly.  The  duty of those providing it is to remain sensitive to the complexity and personal attachment of care.      

My experiences as a mentally ill person have been full of contradictions. On one hand I feel profoundly connected to other people who went through similar experiences. Thosewho listen to the same music, and those who have the same scars. n the other hand, I feel deeply lonely. That is the nature of being ill in many ways: you may be sharing the same illness, the same hospital room, but you are not sharing the same body. No person knows what it is like to inhabit another person's body, mind, and soul (much to the dissatisfaction of many an ethnographer), but you can sit together and hold hands. I cannot tell you what it means to me that the women Sarah Pinto writes about are like me, or perhaps just that we were like versions of each other, because I don’t know. It feels oddly wrong to view them in the way Pinto views them, largely because I am both her and I am those women. Likewise, it feels uncomfortable to interject my own experiences in the nuances of Pinto’s ethnography and project myself on strangers, and it feels equally strange to take the subjective side of the clinicians and caregivers when my experiences are so ontologically akin to those of the women of Moksha.     

Ultimately, what I am left with upon finishing Pinto’s monograph is educational value colored with my own dissolution and questions about what it means to be ill as both a subject and an agent of academia. What does it mean to be a part of a whole that is so pockmarked by pain and abuse across time and space? What does it mean to connect both abstractly and emotionally without any tangible connection? What does it mean to feel that you might truly hear and see someone on a level that supersedes the differences of culture, knowing you will never be contextually the same? What do my feelings mean in the historical perspective of colonialism, anthropology, and psychiatry? These are the questions that float in the margins of my book and now in the addendums to my own memories. What Pinto finds in me as a reader is an unwitting, silent participant in her ethnography; someone who was both there and never there at all.

In Conversation with the Teaching Creativity Team

 Interviewed and edited by Gloria Bhiziki and Elise Lee

Introduction (Written by Dr Anjana Bala) 

Teaching Creativity is a research project co-designed by Maria Efthymiadou, Yixuan (Zoey) Liu, Sasha Rozanov, Bella Kurankye, and Anjana Bala. Born out of a fellowship from the Eden Center and undergraduates looking for summer research experiences, this project prioritizes emergent frameworks, self-expression, and developing a creative voice rather than a set research goal and predetermined agenda. The researchers have individually and collaboratively worked on two phases of the project: first, they each developed personal creative projects over the summer with little parameters and structure. Despite that, each of them created novel and unique artistic works: Bella has created a short film about Black joy, Zoey a photography-video project that is now turning into a series of zines, Sasha an EP, and Maria a collage on femicide in Greece. They were trained in processes of critique, feedback, and support inspired by the Critical Response Process and DAS Theatre Feedback, processes for giving and receiving artistic feedback. They treated their creative projects like fieldwork (the art object and process as the “field”) and have written auto-ethnographic pieces on this process. Secondly, during the fall, each of them developed their research projects exploring creativity in higher education. Bella is exploring whether assessments can include grading the "process" rather than the end "product," Maria is exploring whether corridors can be sites for ephemeral creativity, Sasha is investigating whether university can be a playful space, and Zoey is designing a collaborative note-taking journal. 

Depending on funding, there will likely be a phase 3 in Winter Term 2025, born out of Maria's research and findings, which includes curating their work in a corridor space at LSE. Their work will be curated around the theme of "Unfinished," a recognition that we are always works-in-progress and that whatever we present to the world is only a tiny slice of who we are, like a small door that opens onto forever moving and altering processes.

Can you tell us about the first part of the project? 

Bella: My creative project was a short film about capturing the everyday moments of joy within the black community, specifically black women. It challenges the mainstream narrative that confines black identity to struggle and trauma. The short film was collected over 3 or 4 months during the summer. It highlights black joy in an important way that’s never been seen before. 

 Maria: I created a collage centred around violence against women at the hands of a male partner in Greece using upcycled and recycled materials. Viewers of the piece usually gravitate towards a specific image of a man holding artichokes like a bouquet. The artichokes show the dichotomy within gender roles and how even something romantic could be done with the prospect of gendered expressions such as “What am I going to get out of this and when is she going to get in the kitchen?” I also plan on adding textured aspects inspired by the Wall of Dolls in Italy. It's an art piece on domestic violence with dolls and the names of victims to signify how they’ve been objectified and placed into a societal mould of appearance and promiscuity. To sum everything up, I wrote an Ancient Greek quote in red lipstick on the collage because it’s the colour of blood and love. The quote ‘Έρως ανίκατε μάχαν’ is from Antigone by Sophocles and translates to “Love, unbeatable in battle” but I follow it with a question mark, because is love really unbeatable? 

Sasha: For my project, I’ve been writing songs. This isn’t something I’m new to, but I’ve never committed to a collection of songs. I thought more about what I was communicating because I was aware of an audience and the anthropological thought underpinning the project. For me, the nature of songwriting is introspective observations that you unravel and figuring out how to communicate what feels intangible and try to map a sentiment onto the listener. I explored different modes of configuration and playing, writing, and re-writing and I considered the role of mental environments in communicating that which feels intangible. 

Zoey: My creative project is a photography collection, and the theme is the Japanese word ‘瞬き (Mabataki)’ which means “in the blink of an eye”. I wanted to express this through photography where something disappears in a second and you only realise the importance of this meaningful moment later. I began with a video, but after reviewing it, I found there was something unsatisfying, so I began to design my own zines to explore whether there is something experimental and inspirational beyond only visual aspects. Today, I just went to the London Graphic Centre to test different papers. 

Were there any difficulties you encountered in the project? 

Maria: We started from nothing and were told to do something creative. And as cool as that is, it was also overwhelming to have so many options and wait for inspiration. Other than the difficulty of deciding what to do at first, my topic is sensitive and personal to everyone. I feel like most women, if not all, can relate to this, whether it’s fear in the presence of a man, or worrying about how you’re getting home that night. I considered whether I was portraying it in the right light, if I was excluding some experiences or if I could trigger someone. At the end of the day, I felt that working in the abstract was freeing and translated what I wanted to say; it's direct but not necessarily graphic. 

Sasha: Communicating through abstract forms is difficult – it's like filtering through an endless ball pit and trying to find the centre based on an inkling of something you want to express. You have no logical direction and must navigate the rational with the intuitive. I would play the piano or write in a reactionary way then go back to reason and tweak things from a standpoint of craft. In my reflections, I found it hard to be present and create well with time constraints and when sharing a space with my brother. Social media would also distract me with the ways other people create and the myriads of processes in the professional world that I couldn't access. It’s so psychological when part of the self is invested in it. 

Bella: I agree, it was like trying to find something in a ball pit. I had no idea what I was filming because I had no plan or script and ended up overwhelmed, especially when putting the film together. It's particularly interesting when you create something without a direction because once I put the footage together it all made sense. That was the most magical thing to me. 

Sasha: Completely agree with having no direction. Often, you discover what the song is meant to be halfway through the process. I feel like that’s the human aspect of it as well. 

Zoey: Photography could be considered a traditional methodology in anthropology. In last year’s course, we discussed indigenous media and the debate about “giving the camera back”. Whilst taking photos, I couldn’t find an answer to whether I have a right to represent others, which became the main reason I decided to make zines instead, so I could express my confusion and position towards these ethical questions. This debate persists in anthropology, and I wanted to use zines to express this. 

Anjana: Part of this project’s intention was that anyone can be creative, and it isn’t something taught but rather, as Sasha is exploring in her own work, prompted. I believe students can gain confidence in their own creative voices by entering this place of discomfort and acknowledging creativity must come from themselves. Beginnings always evoke a sense of crisis. I think that it can be empowering once you get over that difficulty. I also think that’s what university is about—learning how to navigate independent choices. Of course, with the right support when necessary and acknowledging that this navigating comes easier to some than others for a variety of reasons. 

Bella: Thank you for giving us the space to meet in a safe space to give each other feedback, advice or support. I remember when my camera broke down and Zoey asked if I wanted to use her camera. 

Sasha: You used the word “safe”. Anjana creates a feeling of safety to get stuck, feel uncomfortable, and explore whatever without judgement. As Anjana was saying, creativity is deeply individual and centred around choices. Choices unguided by external restrictions are scary but you also access untapped agency. 

Maria: Our unfinished theme gives you so much peace because you get to take your time and get a result you are proud of. I forgot to bring a doll that I was going to stick on a collage back home in Cyprus, but I had the chance to finish it physically as I intended because of the flexible deadline. 

Sasha: This differentiation and integration between the deadlines and the unstructured aspects was helpful because we had literature reviews to do, but afterwards, I had all this creative energy, and it felt so good to put away the academic for a second. This marriage between the structured academic side and the creative side was crucial. 

Anjana: I want to reiterate that this work is 100% from them. They are not the research assistants, but the researchers. I think it’s important to talk about creative projects as unfinished. I was telling Sasha about how my peers and I only had one day to rehearse for a huge performance at the Royal Albert Hall, so we knew that whatever we offered would be unfinished; we were always going to offer our imperfect selves. So, what does it mean to be okay with that fact? So, we’re just exploring what it means to inculcate unfinished work into artistic processes. 

Can you tell us about the second part of the project?  

Anjana: They have each designed creative research projects, based on a literature review they conducted over the summer, and are looking at how creativity functions in higher education. 

Bella: My research project considers whether educators should shift from grades to alternative assessments. I really hate how we are only assessed on an essay and wish there were creative alternatives. I’m looking at student and academic staff perspectives and how they can be incorporated into traditional grading systems. I'm interviewing four students to document their revision process and how they submit essays, and I’ll ask four academic staff at the LSE to look at it and consider whether this is an appropriate way of assessing students. 

Sasha: I was looking at creativity understood as an internal experience of novelty and how you can trigger this novelty. I don’t think the end-product is determined by the amount of creativity but rather the amount of craft. I looked at various ethnographies of playing, especially in rituals. This could mean taking a concept or practice and reconfiguring it by finding different angles and colours to see and remodel tradition. I'm considering the current role of play in the LSE and how often and why it’s used by teachers. Also, how creativity perhaps depends on experiences of presence and play. In the creative project, I found myself engaging with play and reconfiguration the most when distractions were absent. I’m exploring this in the context of higher education. 

Zoey: I'm designing a collaborative journal, focussing on the inseparability between critical and creative thinking. In the first part, every student each week can present their ideas from a course in the journal in any creative form: photography, sketches or catalogues. The second part is a questionnaire that critiques the previous person’s work in the journal which could be from a student, a classmate, or an academic staff member.  After the process, I will reveal to them whose work they have critiqued and discover if this breaks down the power hierarchy; or it deepens your understanding of the course materials. 

 Maria: I wondered what spaces trigger creativity in higher education within individuals or collectives, so I decided to investigate the role of corridors in triggering creativity, especially those that have visuals in them and social interactions that happen within them. I read some literature in which staff mentioned how informal spaces like kitchenettes helped provide inspiration and creativity in their teaching. Therefore, I wanted to see how corridors which we consider liminal and unimportant are expanded in use. I will be looking into this through participant observation and then interviewing five students, five teaching staff and five non-teaching staff. I’ll ask them the role corridors play in their day-to-day interactions and consider what we can add to them to trigger creativity, as well as about their views on creativity in their respective roles. 

Anjana: The whole thing is iterative; one person prompts another to consider something else. Hopefully, their work will be able to go up to the third-floor corridor or wherever they are comfortable sharing their art. What's nice is that I may suggest something, and they can refuse and challenge me, and set boundaries. This helps them develop their voice.  

Anjana, how do art and academia intersect?   

Anjana: Anthropology and art intersect on numerous levels: many anthropologists have an artistic practice, and most artists I know consider themselves researchers, it is just a different kind of "research" than we imagine in academia proper. For me, an artistic practice has been crucial for me to develop a sense of cognitive flexibility, curatorial thinking, and above all, self-confidence.  

Anjana, are there any challenges to being an artist and an anthropologist at the same time? 

Anjana: I don't see any challenges per say. Artists and academics both balance a lot of different projects at once, it is just that a portion of my projects are more embodied. I see my dance work as a kind of "edited collection" or "conference", which are both ways of bringing together many different minds, ideas, and practices. 

The iPod Nano: A Cultural Reset

By Marianne Graff

Christmas morning of 2011. As I run down the stairs to see what gifts Santa brought me this year, I find a tiny box. To my amazement, I unwrap it: the iPod Nano. This little pink square marked the start of my music listening journey: this technology revolutionised the way I, and the rest of the world, streamed music. From strictly listening to music on the car radio with my parents, I could now listen to songs I had chosen, at the reach of my fingertips: pretty big deal for an 8 year old. So, I started carefully purchasing songs and curating proto-playlists, with each song choice being special. As the iPod was introduced to the market, streaming music took a completely different direction.

The iPod Nano emerged as a compact, sleek, and highly portable music player in 2005, building upon the success of its predecessors, the iPod Classic. Its introduction marked a significant shift in how people consumed music. As Steve Jobs introduced this new gadget by pulling it out of his front Levi’s pocket (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GRv-kv5XEg), the Nano’s small size and large storage capacity made it easier than ever for users to carry their entire music libraries in their pockets. They now had the  freedom to compose their libraries however they wanted: I strongly believe that the iPod Nano was the start of an obsession for playlists, and their meticulous curation. As the iPod Nano gained popularity, it inevitably contributed to the decline of physical music formats such as CDs, and other streaming channels like the radio. With the ability to store thousands of songs on a single device, consumers no longer relied on CDs to access their favourite tracks. Additionally, the Nano facilitated the rise of digital music downloads through iTunes, further diminishing the need for physical media. Its portability and ease of use encouraged users to listen to music in new settings, from commuting to exercising, leading to a decline in traditional radio listening among younger demographics. Is the iPod Nano at the origin of our generation’s incapacity to do a single activity or chore in silence? This product revolutionised the music listening experience, allowing for greater mobility and convenience: everything now in one place.

The production of the iPod Nano series started in 2005 all the way through the 2010s, with its last release being in 2017. Its smooth design, intuitive interface, and expansive storage capacity resonated with consumers, propelling it to the forefront of the industry. In its first 17 days on the market, the Nano sold one million units : an overwhelmingly positive response. With a capacity to hold 1,000 songs, its convenience  quickly convinced the public, as this showed significant advances compared to a classic mp3’s 100-song capacity. The production of the iPod Nano also led to  the start of illegal download music sites, where, I think it’s safe to say, many of us downloaded our music from back in the day. But when Apple launched iTunes, it was able to take back control, and capitalise on their innovation as much as possible. However, from 2012 onwards, the iPhone started outselling the iPod, and by  a landslide , eventually making  Apple the giant we know today. The rise of smartphones, which offered all characteristics of the iPod, and more, became an unbeatable competitor, making the iPod Nano slowly lose relevance through the years. Apple went on to discreetly discontinue its iPod series in 2017, marking the end of an era.

 While the product has been discontinued, we have seen a rise of the year 2000s (Y2K) comeback both in fashion and in music: a resurgence of interest in retro technologies, driven in part by a yearning for simpler times. Is it just childhood nostalgia as we slowly reach adulthood? As everyone knows: trends work in cycles. Eventually, everything comes back into fashion. I think this applies to music too - or at least in the way it is consumed. We have seen the resurgence  of vinyls in full force the last few years, as well as  CDs and cassettes. So, I wonder, how long until the iPod Nano becomes the next trendy fashion accessory? The renewal of vinyls and such has suggested a potential market for other vintage music formats. However, any comeback must be adapted to modern times:  how will the iPod Nanos of indie film bros in Dalston take form in our current age?

To conclude , it is undeniable that the iPod Nano has had an irreversible influence in the way music is produced and consumed: the product dictated the way iPhones, and thus most smartphones today, function: alongside streaming platforms! Music on our phones is now second nature, thanks to the iPod. The digitalisation of the mp3 thus represents the start of music into digital space: everything is now in the Cloud. Paradoxically the iPod Nano allowed us to have music at our fingertips, And while every aspect of our lives becomes commodified and digitalised, conceptualised as separate from our real material life, are we losing music’s touch? Maybe the reason consumers went back to Vinyls was because we lacked the tactile experience and emotional connection we associate with physical format CDs and vinyls, amidst our technological world. Maybe, the iPod won’t be making a comeback, and people will keep resisting and moving away from digitised music.

Regardless of whether or not it will make a comeback, it is important for us music enjoyers to reflect on what we now consider second nature: easy access to music. Did the iPod Nano start our sensory overstimulation? As music access was more difficult in the past, whether through the necessity of buying vinyls, attending live concerts, or being lucky enough to have access to a radio, listening to songs was considered as more of a special occasion. Maybe as consumers, we are losing the true value of music without realising its full worth, through the commodification of music streaming. Maybe, the comeback of the iPod Nano would help people value the music they handpick, rather than having access to infinite tracks on titanic streaming platforms that have become Spotify or Apple Music. While neoliberalist markets have allowed consumers to have any imaginable product at the tip of their fingers, to what extent should music, and more broadly art, experience the same? Should we all go looking through our childhood memorabilia to uncover our pink iPod Nanos?

Peace at the Expense of Freedom: Western Anti-Imperialism on Ukraine.

By Chad Nickson

Some time ago, I joined a pro-Palestine demonstration and marched down past Downing Street to Parliament Square. As we marched, blue and yellow flags came into view; a small congregation stood in front of Downing Street on the weekly solidarity demonstration for Ukraine. I remember thinking to myself how beautiful it was to see causes against oppression uniting on the streets of my city, but as we drew closer my optimism dropped. The Palestine demonstration sliced directly through the Ukrainian one and short of complete blindness to each other, the only interaction or acknowledgement I picked up on (and I prayed my ears were wrong) was both groups chanting louder, as if trying to drown out the other. Competing for their spot in the cacophony of London’s Wednesday evening; the atmosphere between the two groups seemed hostile.

In Parliament Square, I approached a ‘Stop the War Coalition’ stand and expressed my concern about their pamphlet ‘Lies, Propaganda, and the West’s War Ukraine’ written by founder Chris Nineham. The title of this pamphlet alone betrays its political stance, and I challenged the rep at the stall on elements in it which fed directly into Russian propaganda. Nineham’s pamphlet presents repeatedly disproved pro-Russian arguments that the invasion of Ukraine is somehow justified by NATO expansion. Nineham quotes Russian scholar Anatol Lieven that the US knew that “moves toward NATO membership for Ukraine would be regarded by Russians as a catastrophe of epochal proportions” without apparently consider that Ukraine desires NATO membership because of centuries of Russian aggression. Nineham also falsely describes the 2014-2022 war in the Donbas, and the annexation of Crimea, as purely a civil war between separatists and the government when it was largely a Russian occupation. After I laid out my arguments, I was patronisingly told to ‘agree to disagree’ with a handshake. When I refused, I was told to ‘f*** off’.

I was furious and heartbroken. Here I was, standing at a demonstration for freedom with people I would call friends or comrades, and yet having to defend the basic ‘left-wing’ lines of solidarity with the oppressed, that ‘none are free until all are free’ and that, quite simply, invading another country is bad. I left. On my way home, I returned to lend my solidarity to the Ukrainian demonstration. If no other pro-Palestine campaigners would, at least I would. I stood there, Keffiyeh around my neck and Ukrainian pin on my lapel and listened to the speaker defend US and Western imperialism because “nobody is perfect” ... Needless to say, I left that demonstration in a state of fury as well.

2 year anniversary demonstration of the full scale Ukrainian invasion, Feb. 2024

The simplistic narrative of ‘Stop the War’ is not a fringe ideology. In June 2023, Glasgow UCU passed a ‘Stop the War’ motion which characterised the war as a “battleground for Russian and US imperialism” and individuals speaking in support of the motion explicitly accused NATO of “warmongering”. It is a staggering feat of mental gymnastics to accuse the US of the same crime as Russia in this war, but it is one taken again and again. Take a look at the replies to any Instagram post on Ukraine by ‘Al Jazeera’ and you will see the vitriol there is for the Ukrainian struggle: a post about Zelenskyy’s ‘Victory Plan’ proposal on the 11th October 2024 prompted comments that “the only reason for this war is Russia don’t want nato weapons”, and accusations regarding Zelenskyy “finessing” NATO for money. Instagram comments may not be the most reliable source of news, but it is an indication of an ideological pattern, one which justifies Russian Imperialism. A pattern of Russian flags being flown during the coups in former French colonies such as Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Chad. A pattern which includes President Lula of Brazil accusing NATO of starting the war, and of the great anti-imperialist Noam Chomsky describing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as ‘more humane’ than the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 despite the over 100,000 potential Russian war crimes documented so far. The US-led invasion of Iraq was a horrific crime, that is undeniable. Comparing illegal invasion with illegal invasion is a pointless and destructive task, this too is undeniable (Chomsky’s arguments were passionately dismantled an “Open Letter to Noam Chomsky (and Other Like-Minded Intellectuals) on the Russia-Ukraine War”, written by Bohdan Kukharskyy, Anastassia Fedyk, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Ilona Sologoub). This pattern is described by Ukrainian lecturer Yuliya Yurchenko from the University of Greenwich as “the anti-imperialism of amoral idiots”. It seems that those who oppose Western (the US, Britain, and Western Europe) Imperialism are susceptible to the simplistic narrative that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ which leads them to justify the Russian invasion.

Yurchenko’s diagnosis bears semblance to the “Anti-Imperialism of Fools” that academic Fred Halliday identified amongst left-wing groups who supported the 1979 Iranian revolution, despite the obviously repressive politics of its leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. The uncritical identification with Khomeini as an ‘anti-Western’ figure, as historian David Graeson notes in, “distorted the views of those who would ordinarily have opposed his regime on class grounds”. A similar misreading can be found in modern views of Russia, where Putin’s ‘anti-Western’ appearance distorts the views of those who would (and should) oppose his regime on the grounds of its extreme repression. Graeson writes that the failure of left-wing groups in 1979 to accurately assess the situation led to disillusionment with left wing ideologies and groups fracturing. The same fractures are apparent today, where pro-Palestine and pro-Ukraine rallies chant against each other, rather than uniting in solidarity.

March for Palestine

Anti-imperialists who are primarily focused on the imperial and neo-imperial projects of the ‘West’ (the US, Britain, and Western Europe) are typified in this country by hard left groups like ‘Stop the War’. The movement was founded in 2001 shortly after 9/11 in opposition to the so-called ‘War on Terror’ and in its early years fought against the horrors unleashed by US-led forces against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. Before ‘Stop the War’, and since then, there have been others who have fought the wrong associated with Western imperial heritages, by campaigning for colonial reparations, challenging institutional racism, or opposing military intervention. These campaigns, which have cut their teeth opposing Western power and intervention, seem to find themselves in a moral quagmire around the politics of Ukraine. On the one hand, solidarity is one of the most defining features of anti-Imperial politics (demonstrated admirably by the huge support for Palestine) and standing in solidarity with Ukraine is an anti-imperialist position, this is clear. It is, in historian Timothy Snyder’s words “a situation of unusual moral simplicity” in which a sovereign nation was attacked in clear violation of international law by a dictatorship and is now defending itself and asking for help. On the other hand, Ukraine (by necessity, it should be added) is in bed with the imperial ‘West’. In an ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ logic, to stand in solidarity with Ukraine means to betray the belief that Western military intervention is always bad. The situation is made more challenging by the USA’s ‘ironclad’ support for Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza. It is the same military aid bill that provides defence to Ukraine which gives Israel the means to bomb Palestinian children. This is, obviously, unconscionable. Tying Ukraine and Israel together in this way leads many who are less knowledgeable of the 300 years of Russian oppression of Ukrainians to reject Ukraine alongside Israel.

There are two paradoxes at play here. The first is of US support for Ukraine and Israel. Morally and practically the difference is staggering. In the case of Ukraine, weapons a supplied for full scale land warfare against a much more powerful invading enemy. In Israel, weapons are supplied to a colonising power with one of the best militaries in the world, against a tiny strip of land which has no official army and is one of the most densely populated places on earth. The US rhetoric which aligns the two as similar struggles is frankly absurd, but the paradox is easily explained through cold strategy - it is geopolitically useful for America to support them both. In this sense, leftist commentators have it right that the US is not morally engaged in the war. But this is where the second paradox emerges: ‘solidarity for the oppressed’ and ‘condemnation of the West’ seem incompatible on the occasion that the West supports the oppressed. Dishearteningly, it seems that many prioritise the latter at the expense of solidarity. Those that don’t, find themselves in the uncomfortable position of seeming to defend the US military. This paradox is fuelled by simplistic political narratives. In a world of larger-than-life heroes and scheming villains, in which every story must have a protagonist and an antagonist, politics takes on a ‘sloganized’, cynical tone in which political strife must be condensed into nothing more than a sentence. ‘Stop the War’; ‘Make America Great Again’; ‘Get Brexit Done’; ‘Education, Education, Education’. These slogans, which define so much of our politics distil complex political ideology and struggle into unrealistically simple single-issue campaigns which become blind to context. The problem with ‘Stop the War’ is not simply that it is wrong about Ukraine but that it is a simplistic single-issue campaign. The group's line is entirely predictable because it is true that the quickest way to stop the war is for Ukraine to stop defending itself. Unfortunately, that would mean defeat. Once the ‘war is stopped’ and Ukraine is defeated, what remains? Oppression and occupation, proven to be brutal by survivors of the occupied regions, and a victorious dictator with an explicit desire to destabilise and invade other neighbours, such as Georgia, of which Russia already occupies a fifth. In short, to ‘Stop the War’ is to freeze the war – to mutate the violence from defence to occupation. It is a privileged position to prioritise peace over freedom.

The lack of support for Ukraine from often hard-left spokespeople in this country is a betrayal, and one with serious repercussions. These spokespeople are not only alienating moderates but also those who prioritise anti-imperialism above all. What may be overlooked is another anti-imperialist stance, one which rejects all imperialism, be it Western, or Russia’s imperialism in Ukraine. The agency of Ukrainians, Georgians, and all others who share a tense border with Russia and do not have the comfort of distance is also sidelined. As Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra Povoroznyk pointed out, “a lot of people in the West are denying Ukraine any sort of agency by claiming we’re constantly being manipulated by NATO or saying it’s a US proxy war and the West is forcing us to fight. None of these people are actually paying attention to what we’re [Ukrainians] actually saying”.

So, what is to be done? 

First, we must reflect. The ‘West’: Britain, Western Europe, and the US, is removed from war. We have the privilege of peace and freedom; we have not had them taken from us against our will. We have the space to debate and discuss, to write. The wars our country has fought have taken place far away. Modern Britain has been an invader, but it does not know anymore what it means to be invaded. In this environment, simplistic narratives fit onto a placard with much less of a headache.

Unfortunately, the reality of war is much more complicated, so we must listen to those who are not removed. As Oleksandra Povoroznyk has said, to understand what the Ukrainian people want requires one to listen to Ukrainians. That is the first step to acknowledging agency. Through listening we will hear that many Ukrainians, for a very long time, have desired stronger defence against Russia and a closer relationship to Europe. We will see that they had an entire revolution to this effect in 2014 (which was not a “US backed coup” as some narratives suggest). We will see that the simplistic narrative of Ukraine as a puppet of the ‘warmongering’ West assumes no Ukrainian agency. 

We may then begin to challenge the simplistic narratives of our politics. The arguments I am challenging here boil down to the simplistic worldview that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend: that the imperial ‘West’ is the enemy, and so its enemy Russia may be a friend, or at the very least not as ‘bad’. This is a slippery slope into ruthless geo-political chess and a black and white binary of ‘friend and foe’, ‘goodie and baddie’, as though we live in a Marvel movie. The reality is messier. Russia, the US, and many other political powers are motivated by self-interest: trade, access to natural resources, money, defence. It is cold strategy which leads the US to support Ukraine and Israel, just as it is cold strategy that allows Russia to condemn Israel while invading Ukraine. Stopping at the ‘cold strategy’ in our analysis of conflict is playing the game of the great powers and betraying the reality of those suffering. By doing away with simplistic narratives and platforming the voices of those most affected, it is possible to both condemn the West and its role in destruction whilst also acknowledging that its military support for Ukraine is currently the only option in their self- defence against imperialism.

 I began this article with the voices on the ground of London. Voices which should unite against imperialism and invasion, but which instead divide because of simplistic views of global power. To conclude, I turn, as I urge us all to do, to the voices on the ground in Ukraine. Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion, two letters were written to Noam Chomsky. Artem Chapeye, a previous translator of Noam Chomsky’s works penned a letter to “some Left-Wing Intellectuals”. Specifically, he addressed Chomsky, and his claims that Ukraine was “dragged into the war” by the US and NATO. In the letter, he begged: “listen to the local voices here on the ground, not some sages sitting at the centre of global power. Please start your analysis with the suffering of millions of people, rather than geopolitical chess moves. Start with the columns of refugees …”. Chapeye, a self-proclaimed pacifist, became a soldier after the full-scale invasion, declaring that the option - the privilege - of pacifism was lost to him on the day that Putin’s missiles began to fall.

Queer Nature: Anthropological Reflections from my Summer at Kew Gardens

By Mahliqa Ali

‘Isn’t this wokeness gone mad, first plants are racist, and now you’re saying plants are gay?’

 During the summer of last year, I worked at Kew Gardens, and when I heard that we were hosting an event called ‘Queer Nature,’ this was exactly the kind of comment I expected to hear. Based in Richmond in Surrey, the typical Kew Gardens visitor is reflective of the typical inhabitant of this scenic West London borough; most members and regular visitors are white, middle-class, middle-aged locals, and the area is known for its high number of Tories; unsurprisingly, Richmond Park & North Kingston Conservatives have one of the largest memberships of any Conservative Association in the UK.

The day-long 9am-5pm training session held for the Visitor Hosts reflected my fears – we all anticipated a backlash from the average Kew clientele, who might voice similar critiques to right-wing media personalities such as Piers Morgan, who ranted about ‘Kew going woke,’ and angrily questioning ‘Why can’t we just have straight plants?’. From these preliminary responses, Kew management developed a training programme in collaboration with an EDI session facilitator for us to prepare responses to homophobic comments we may receive from Kew-goers who were offended by placards stating that fungal reproduction is often asexual, and that many palm trees have both ‘male’ and ‘female’ reproductive organs.

The training sheet involved scripted answers to the questions, ‘Isn’t this jumping on a woke bandwagon, what do plants have to do with people being labelled queer?’, ‘Why is Kew running a festival just for the LGBTQ+ community?’, and my personal favourite, ‘Isn’t this wokeness gone mad, first plants are racist and now you’re saying plants are gay?’

The standard of the training impressed me – they covered common LGBTQ terms, defined labels, covered the history of gay rights and the sensitive history of the word ‘queer’ itself, prepared us to give answers which would shut down blatant bigotry and minimise complaints, and took the time to teach us about the individual contributing artists and their work.

The exhibition involved several installations within the Temperate Greenhouse, in the form of spoken word poetry, tapestries, plant installations, videos, and information boards, all along the theme of demonstrating that nature evidently does not fit into male/female binaries of reproductive parts and processes, and despite scientific aims to categorise plants and their characteristics into bounded classifications, the diversity of nature is not best portrayed by these rigid systems, just as humans are not. The After-Hours events involved music, cabaret, comedy, and drag performances.

The combination of the heavy preparation we were doing in anticipation of negative feedback from the event, and what we were hearing about general attitudes from the loudest voices in right-wing media (and the comments on Richmond community Facebook forums), myself and the other Visitor Hosts felt a lot of apprehension for the exhibition. I was almost certain that it wasn’t going to be well received, that we’d have to deal with homophobia every day, and that it would be a disappointment to queer people who would find it overhyped after they travelled to see it because of the adverts all over London.

But when I walked into the Temperate Greenhouse for my first shift at the exhibition, I was very pleasantly surprised to find Judith Butler’s face on a huge poster looking back at me. The entire exhibition had been so thoughtfully curated; it was a genuinely beautiful collection of art, science, and gender theory.

House of Spirits - Jeffrey Gibson

There was a spoken word poetry performance called ‘Reverberations’ by two artists about diversity, beauty, and queerness in nature, a planted area of pansies in honour of ‘The Pansy Project,’ in which artist Paul Harfleet plants pansies at sites where homophobic and transphobic violence has occurred across London and the world, a plant display called ‘Breaking the Binary,’ curated by Patrick Featherstone Gardens, comprised of plants which reproduce in ways that challenge conventional norms of male/female binary reproduction, a tapestry titled ‘House of Spirits’ by Jeffrey Gibson, created with botanical illustrations from Kew’s archives as an homage to the underground ball subculture of queer African-American and Latino communities in New York City, and a beautiful wall of tags where visitors were invited to write how they felt in response to the exhibition.

 In particular, what really caught my interest was the way that science, which people have so much faith in as the true confirmer of facts, was used to prove that what people dismiss as unnatural and unscientific is actually a scientifically demonstrable part of nature. As anthropologists, we all know about the politics of knowledge production, and how dominant narratives reflect hegemonic understandings. I like to think of anthropology as a ‘potentially revolutionary praxis, because it forces us to question our theoretical presuppositions about the world, produce knowledge that is new, was confined to the margins, or was silenced.’ (Alpa Shah 2017) I have become frustrated countless times in the process of trying to explain this to my STEM friends. I felt enlightened by the way the exhibition had harnessed the respect that science receives as ‘the ultimate legitimate authority’ to expand people’s thinking.

The combination of art, science, and nature made complex academic ideas so digestible, concise, and clear while maintaining their richness and not being overly reductive. Throughout my anthropology degree, I have encountered so many fascinating ideas that I wish were more present in mainstream discourse. As I painstakingly make my way through pages and pages of dense critical theory about gender and sexuality for my course on gender and kinship, I often fear that these ideas, which are so important and so potentially world-altering, only ever circulate in academic circles. I often find myself wishing that anthropological theorists wrote more like David Graeber; unpretentious, understandable, and accessible.

I love the work of theorists like Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, and don’t want to understate or undermine the immense value of their writing for the anthropology of kinship, sex, and gender. But spending my summer watching a range of audiences from queer university students well-versed in countering conventions, to more conservative older visitors, all engaging with queer theory in diverse and open-minded ways, gave me a renewed sense of hope about the power that anthropology contains to challenge the preconceived assumptions that people carry with them in their perception of the world. The average non-anthropology-student is most likely not going to read an extensive, complex analytical deconstruction of heteropatriarchal societal structures, but they can most definitely engage with these ideas if they are made comprehensible and approachable.

 I wanted to include a special mention of a contributor to the exhibition: Drag performer and anthropologist, Cheddar Gorgeous (aka Dr Michael Atkins), who focuses on disrupting gender conventions, contemporary urban gay spaces, and using graphic novellas as a form of ethnographic storytelling – Their work has been inspiring to me by demonstrating how an anthropologist can ensure their counter-conventional work isn’t limited to the academic sphere.

 During that summer, I lost count of the amount of times I heard people say ‘I’ve never thought of it like that before.’ By definition, any ideas which challenge dominant understandings are going to be initially limited in their reach, and their merit derives from not being mainstream; but gatekeeping anthropological knowledge with complicated jargon doesn’t do anyone any favours. It has become clear to me that embracing interdisciplinary methods of presenting the knowledge that anthropology produces is an effective way to expand the reach of our discipline’s vital insights.

References:

 Ethnography? Participant observation, a potentially revolutionary praxis – Alpa Shah (2017)

Piers Morgan rages over Kew Gardens ‘Queer Nature’ Event – Pink News (2023)

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/09/07/kew-gardens-queer-nature-piers-morgan/

The Cinematic Universe of Women’s rage

By Ayomide Asani

Female Rage is all the Rage these days, (get it? ‘rage’ as in rage). But more seriously Womxn's anger has captured mainstream attention in the form of articles, video essays, and social media phenomena. Cinema today is littered with portrayals of Female Rage. ‘Movie Tok’ has also captured our fascination with womxn’s anger on screen. What I am concerned with, is how Female Rage and an Anthropology of Emotion intersect today. More importantly, how can Anthropology contribute to feminist discussions of womxn’s experiences?  

This short essay will define female rage through an urban dictionary definition that states ‘female rage is a rejection of gendered ideas regarding who gets to express anger and in what ways’. Patriarchy touches every element of life and emotions are not exempt from this. Stereotypically womxn are labeled as emotional, spreading the idea that emotional expression can be differentiated by gender. For generations, womxn and femme people have been undergoing systematic modes of oppression that entrap womxn from bodily autonomy,  perpetual sexual violence, and economic oppression. Under these systems of misogyny depictions within Film, Music, and Media use rage to collectivise and revolutionise womxn struggles. Centuries of womxn have felt the generational trauma at the hands of misogyny. 

In anthropology, we view emotion as a way of knowing and a form of knowledge, which is often painted negatively in comparison to rationality as a post-enlightenment and patriarchal knowledge. This negativity trivialises womxn's emotions and also systematically bars men from expressing any form of emotion for fear of emasculation. Media has been a way of both perpetuating this and a means of expression for womxn. Sad Girl Tumblr epitomised womxn and young teenage girls' sadness. Lana del Ray, Effie, and Bella Swan ruled Tumblr posts and young womxn began to romanticise their sadness through smoky smudged eyeliner and ripped tights. This time was symbolic of young womxn struggling with mental health who wanted to feel seen and find community through female adolescence and the sometimes turbulent transition from girlhood to womanhood. This sadness is a direct result of the pressures that come with being identified as a womxn within society. For many womxn, these platforms weren’t a place to idolise mental health issues but to understand the reasons for these issues and their connection to their gender identity. In retrospect however, Sad Girl Tumblr has been criticised for its fetishization of sadness while creating a toxic outlet that didn’t facilitate the healing of young girls struggling with insecurities and mental health issues but instead pushed them further into the depths of sadness. This doesn’t mean that artists only speak on sadness as a way of demoralising womxn but rather sheds light on the importance of vocalising sadness. 

Emotional knowledge was used as a way to consolidate solidarity between womxn allowing womxn to be empowered by their emotions rather than being suppressed. Thus, media has shaped ways of portraying and understanding sadness, but can simultaneously be construed as a platform for female empowerment.

It could be theorised that Female Rage is a reactionary response to the passive sadness that dominated the internet in the past years, evoking womxn and girls alike to reclaim their pain through an ‘agency of anger’(Shanspeare 2023). Sadness became too idle and muted, elegant tears became limiting. The angry womxn was becoming a way of expressing collective feminine rage to the psychological distress of being a womxn. Female Rage has become synonymous with female autonomy - being able to express emotions powerfully and chaotically, rather than fearing the gendered stereotypes towards womxn's emotions. Womxn alike are hungry for raw depictions of anger. To have their anger seen and made visible rather than hidden behind docile controlled emotions.  

The Sad to Angry Pipeline is well documented within music in Aretha Franklin's 1967 Album ‘I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You’  Franklin uses her soulful voice to depict heartbreak through the blues while progressing to an angry jazz sound in her timeless hit ‘Respect’ her strong vocal riffs illustrates the shift from melancholy to fury effortlessly. Speaking to the exasperation that womxn feel in response to constant disrespect. Similarly, SZA, a Pop RnB artist, invokes these themes through her vulnerable lyricism in her song  ‘SOS’ she raps unapologetically ‘I talk bullshit a lot no more fuck shit I’m done’ (SZA 2022b) The blunt attitude directly juxtaposes lyrics like ‘Only like myself when I’m with you, Nobody gets me’ (SZA 2022c), an emotionally charged track that imploys the slow violin to encapsulate the themes of loss that SZA is expressing. In Fiona Apple's music, she also displays this progression of sadness to anger within her music within the song ‘Paper Bag’ Apple's tonal voice shifts from soft to tense as the song progresses communicating feelings of madness through the quickening tempo. As such, womxn resonate with outbursts of rage at an emotional breaking point. These bursts of fury are usually defined by screaming, yelling, and messy emotional breakdowns, basically what is typically defined as pure anger. However, anger is not only expressed in one way. Linguistic differences mean that many societies don’t have a word directly for anger but instead have words that express some aspects of, or varieties of, anger. For example, anger among Inuit people is expressed differently than in the West where anger is controlled from a young age and aggressive expressions of emotion are minimal. ‘Inuit, social order did not derive merely from following rules of expression, it depended on feeling culturally appropriate emotions. As they saw it, emotions motivated behavior’(Briggs 2000).

Female Rage has become a subgenre within cinema as nuanced storytelling surrounding womxn begins to expand. Rage has become both cathartic and satisfactory for many womxn to see portrayed on screen. Looking at the case of horror regarding female rage, we see how emotions and cinema are both socio-culturally constructed. In American Horror Story (2013) Angela Basset plays the titular role of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, becoming an ensemble cast member. Marie Laveau’s anger is expressed in a controlled and powerful way, in response to the injustice that black people endure due to racism. Vengeance through violence is a running thread and the audience is enthralled by Marie’s flair for empowering black womxn as Marie uses her powers to exact revenge on those who have wronged her. This anger is displayed through Marie's methods of revenge poisoning and murder allowing the horror genre to be fruitful in revealing black womxn’s rage. 

(The Reluctant Bride by August Toulmoche, 1866)

In Waiting to Exhale (1995)  Basset plays the character of Bernie married to the cheating John here Bernie is shattered by her husband's betrayal allowing the audience to understand her pain, regret, and ultimately outrage about the adultery. Olvia Pope (Scandal) and Annalise Keating (How to Get Away with Murder) also demonstrate the rage of black womxn in response to both betrayal and racism. Portrayals of black womxn experiencing rage on-screen are considerably controlled with mainstream depictions centering around racism, cheating husbands, and intense misogynoir. Due to the ‘Angry Black Woman’ stereotype, media portrayals need to be incredibly careful to not generalise all black womxn as angry and aggressive. Black womxn’s anger is constantly suppressed and monitored meaning that Black womxn's rage is inextricably linked to systematic modes of oppression. Black womxn’s rage is politicised with racial surveillance, with black womxn constantly having to survey their emotions for fear of being labeled as ‘angry’. I and many other black womxn have the shared experience of self-monitoring emotions and behaviors to avoid being perceived negatively and for the comfort of others. This penetrates the media which discourages extreme portrayals of black womxn's rage which disrupts mainstream sensibilities. Contrastingly, in Pearl (2022), we see a visceral depiction of female rage. Indicating rage brewing amid toxic mother-daughter relationships, isolation, and rejection from wider society. Voice is a tool of agency in Pearl, where she constantly screams and yells. The expression of anger becomes a dream fantasy idolised by commentators on TikTok Edits. People connect to Pearl's rage. 

Womxn of colour explore anger on a different terrain than that of white womxn as their anger is even more taboo in public spaces. Racial stereotyping of Angry Black womxn has meant black womxn are under constant scrutiny for how they present their emotions if they are even allowed to present said emotions. Thus, making the display of anger another privilege given to white people. The emotions of black people are often seen as threatening or demeaning. Furthermore, womxn of colour are at the intersection of racial and gendered trauma. In many ways, their ownership of trauma is robbed from them. They are put in an ‘either-or situation’ making it impossible for them to feel both their traumas and the wider systemic trauma that has been placed upon them. Thinking of Katherine’s bathroom monologue in Hidden Figures (2016), where she has to travel off-building to use the bathroom due to segregation and isn’t allowed to wear comfortable clothing as she must also perform femininity in the workplace. Her anger and frustration stem from racist treatment under segregation.

Many depictions of black female rage hyperfocus on black womxn's rage rooting in jealousy of white womxn. For example, in ‘In Waiting to Exhale’ Bernadine burns her husband's car due to his cheating here the rage is controlled and calculated as a build-up of frustration over time. Because black womxn are scrutinised for their rage it must be justified under intense scrutiny within Western media. For, white womxn in Western media, anger is messy and uncontrollable. Yet, Nigerian film industry womxn’s rage in all instances is common in films both in loud and quiet on-screen performances. 

The media itself provides an empowering outlet for womxn to express both anger and sadness. Such expressions can be active forms of resistance against patriarchal systems that invalidate expressions of emotion. The song ‘Kill Bill’ by SZA blends the feminisation of sadness and anger into a Pop RnB hit with over a billion streams on Spotify. Why has the song garnered so much popularity since its release? Artist popularity, strong lyrical and production capabilities, or perhaps the relatability of experiencing anger and sadness during a breakup. Art has always had a way of giving negative emotions agency in a modern world where late-stage capitalism and modern-day patriarchy have simultaneously commodified the expression of emotions and imposed strict gendered norms on them.

A Catalan Christmas in Times of Genocide

By Soufyaan Timol - cover photo taken by author

One of the first images that strikes me as I lug my sister’s suitcase through the roads of Central Barcelona, mere hours after our plane landed, are the words chalked on a wall near a children’s playground: ‘Gaza no estás sola’. Only few meters away, marked in red across a traffic sign, is the emblematic A of anarchism, surrounded by a circle. A feeling of the transcendent breathes through the streets of Barcelona, of the unspoken, the unspeakable. I notice it again and again; a tradition that should be dead, buried; plastered all around the squares, featured in the display windows of bookshops, graffitied on walls and shop shutters, and all over the buildings it has appropriated. This tradition, anarchism, though repressed and suppressed, shunned from the mainstream, survives 87 years since its flag was raised against the rise of fascism in Spain.  

‘Viva Palestina libre’ (Long live Free Palestine) and ‘Sionistas = Nazis’ (Sionists = Nazis) on the walls of Barcelona. Photo taken by author.

            In the spring of 1939, after 3 years of a civil war that left half a million people dead, the Spanish republic fell to Franco’s fascist forces. 36 years of a sadistic military dictatorship followed. Franco banned democratic elections, crushed unions, voided progressive laws, sent refugees to die in Hitler’s death camps, and established his own concentration camps where hundreds of thousands would be imprisoned. The dictatorship only ended in 1975 with his death, and a new democratic republic was established. Franco’s generals made sure that along his body, they buried the memory of his massacres, sweeping them under the rug of history (1). A minor blip in the country’s evolution, a time you don’t speak about, distorted, erased.

As well as the 36 years of dictatorship, the new state excised from Spain’s history the anti-fascist resistance. In Barcelona, no monument stands, no museum salutes, no day celebrates, perhaps one of the most momentous events in the West’s political history: the Spanish revolution.

When, in Catalonia, after the collapse of the republic and the initial attempt at a fascist coup, workers, organized in massive syndicates, armed themselves and brought down the fascist attacker, and, with the republic frozen, incapacitated, erected their own stateless society. Then Catalonia was run, not by the Spanish state, not by any political party, but by its working people, through a variety of anarchist and socialist syndicates. They collectivized production, introduced free healthcare, legalized abortion, and led a relentless war against social hierarchy. For three years, Catalans undertook the most radical of social experiments. George Orwell, who, like the tens of thousands of international volunteers, travelled to Spain to fight the fascists, wrote, in one of his most beautiful works, Homage to Catalonia (1938):

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists… Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shopwalkers looked at you in the face and treated you as an equal… There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

            Over three years of civil war, Franco’s forces, aided by fascist Germany and Italy, tolerated (and sometimes supported) by the Allies, vanquished the revolution, conquered city by city, until even Barcelona crumbled. What remains today are the mass graves, holding over 100, 000 bodies of Franco’s victims. The subsequent effort to erase from Spain’s memory — not just the anti-fascist resistance, but also the revolutionary moment, whereby for a few years the absolute reality of capitalism stood defeated, dumb, unable to rely but on its most reactionary bloc — was total, hegemonic. But the anarchist tradition lives on.

            Walking around central Barcelona, I feel the libertarian spirit, alive and uncompromising. Street art abounds, with a character more left-wing than punk, more anarchist than anti-system. Posters calling for radical political action decorate every other wall along the streets of the historical old town. Massive squats skirt the edges of Central, where anarchist groups organize free dinners, clothes drives, reading groups, movie screenings, vigils, protests, occupations. Red-black manifestos dot the notice boards of Barcelona’s castle-like university. At the very heart of the city survives a bookshop run by the same syndicate, the CNT, that led the liberation of Catalonia in 1936.

Picture of the Libreria La Rosa de Foc run by the CNT syndacate in Barcelona. Photo taken by author.

            In times where Israel’s ethno-fascist regime visits incessant destruction upon Gaza, at a rate of 300 deaths a day, it is impossible to stroll around Barcelona and, unless one confines herself to the tourist-chosen spots, to miss the support for Palestine. I feel safer, less secluded, knowing I am not alone in standing against genocide, unlike in Rome and Florence, which I also visited over the holidays, or in Mauritius, where friends tell me the subject is alien to most, or in London, where, despite the massive protests, the indifference, the silence, of academics, of universities and student unions, of the so-called ‘progressive’ left, deafens.

            Through one of the numerous plastered posters — of which I manage to swipe a stunning one for my room, at the cost of a few angry looks from passers-by — I learn of a march for Gaza on my first day in Barcelona. The gathering, of a few hundred people, begins in front of a center for Catalan independence. The faces are young. Dozens of candles are passed around, and we light each other’s.

            The chants throughout the march echo the feeling of those one would find in London. ‘Des del riu fins al mar, Palestina lliure’, ‘Israel asesina, Europa patrocina’. One resonates a bit more with me: ‘Gaza no estás sola’. Gaza you are not alone. Even when the world’s major powers support and finance your martyrdom, when the global intelligentsia baptizes you a home for terrorists, when most remain indifferent to your oppression, Gaza you are not alone.

            At the end of the march, some speakers share a few words about Palestine, mostly in Catalan, which eludes me, though two or three deliver their speeches in Spanish, which I can somewhat understand. They state the death toll, standing then at 20,000, of which 8,000 are children. A woman, her back draped with the Palestinian flag, mentions how even the pope condemned Israel for its war crimes after Israeli snipers shot dead two Christian women in a church. His words, too late, too soft, fall short of addressing the gravity of the situation. Even the term ‘ceasefire’ leaves one’s moral sense wanting, when what people are calling for is simply an end to genocide.

Picture of the march the author has taken part into. Photo taken by author.

            A young woman, probably a university student, describes with poignant thoroughness the man-made hell that the IDF has fashioned of Gaza: the bombing in the north, then the bombing in the south, the wholesale destruction of hospitals, refugee centers, schools, churches and mosques, the assassination of journalists, the parading of men naked in the streets, the cold-blooded murder of its own hostages, the eradication of entire families and the starvation of survivors, the denial of water and electricity, the harvesting of organs (2).

She accuses Israel of being of being a fascist (3) settler colonial project, the West’s monster, crafted in its own image, shaped by the legacy of the white man in the Americas, in Namibia and Ethiopia, in India and Australia, who, in his time, would enact ‘punitive expeditions’ against the uncooperative colonial subjects. When, calling upon the military might of his state, the colonizer would respond to an act of rebellion, real or invented; maybe the subject had burnt a settler alive, or tortured and raped women, or beheaded infant children. Simply uttering the name of the crime would make it true (4), a crime so horrific, so barbarian, so savage, committed against civilization, that the boundaries of law could not accommodate the response. Biblical extermination was called for; a violence so complete it would extinguish any hope of liberation. When Netanyahu asks the people of Israel to “remember what Amalek has done to you,” and to fight accordingly, he means that, as the bible verse he quotes says, the war of extermination waged upon Gaza is to spare no man, woman or infant (5).

             There is anger, terrible fury, in her voice as she concludes, but so is there hope. Barcelona’s memory of resistance resonates loud in her anti-fascist rhetoric. She closes, not by calling for a ceasefire, but for an end to colonization and imperialism, for a world free of borders, free of ethnic hatred, free of fascism.

——

Over the next few days, while the city lights up with preparations for Christmas, I walk around with a bittersweet taste in my mouth. One cannot escape the reality of the genocide in Palestine. Millions displaced, entire neighborhoods levelled, their very social reality destroyed. But here, I cannot escape the pro-Palestinian movement against this genocide either, uncompromising, libertarian in spirit and in action. I already feel nostalgic; I know that I am barely scratching the surface of what this anarchist tradition holds over these few days. Knowing that it exists, though, that it lives on, is comfort enough. If European fascism, in a metastasized, ethno-religious form, survives into the 21st century, so does the resistance to it, and so do the radical possibilities that this resistance offers.   

Notes

(1)   The ‘Pack of Oblivion’, passed in 1977, imposed that Spain would not recall this history of fascism, and especially not prosecute the war criminals.

(2)   A recent article by the human rights organization Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor calls for an investigation in what looks very likely to be organ theft on the bodies of Palestinians (read here). The article was republished by an arm of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - OCHA (read here).

(3)   Chris Hedges, who has studied Israel’s policies for over 30 years, covering the rise of the Israeli far-right, writes, in a beautiful piece: “there has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has control of the Israeli State.” (read here).

(4)   The degree to which the mainstream media has parroted Israel’s unsubstantiated claims is extreme, especially when all previous ones have been disproved. For a thorough deconstruction of Israel’s lies, see Lindsay Collen’s article for LALIT: Debunking Israel’s Lies and Propaganda (read here).

(5)   The Bible verse Netanyahu references, 1 Samuel 15:3, states, “Now go and smite Amalek, utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

References

• Collen, Lindsey (2023) ‘Genocide Blog 17 - Debunking Israel’s Lies and Propaganda’. Available at: https://www.lalitmauritius.org/en/newsarticle/3269/genocide-blog-17debunking-israeli-lies-and-propaganda/

• Euro Med Human Right Monitor (2023) ‘Int’l committee must investigate Israel’s holding of dead bodies in Gaza’​. Available at: https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5982/Int%E2%80%99l-committee-must-investigate-Israel%E2%80%99s-holding-of-dead-bodies-in-Gaza%E2%80%8B

• Hedges, Chris (2023) ‘Israel’s Final Solution for the Palestinians’. Available at: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israels-final-solution-for-the-palestinians

• Relief Web (2023) ‘Int’l committee must investigate Israel’s holding of dead bodies in Gaza’. Available at: https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/intl-committee-must-investigate-israels-holding-dead-bodies-gaza-enar

• Orwell, George (1938) Homage to Catalonia

In Conversation With Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta

Following their Friday Seminar, we had the pleasure of interviewing Professors Akhil Gupta and Purnima Mankekar from the University of California, Los Angeles on their new book titled ‘Future Tense: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Transnational Service Industry’. The book explores the lives and work-lives of intimate strangers that make up Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) agents in South India. Since 2000, the BPO industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. These workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online with customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere.

The calls are not only signifiers of transnational flows of capital, but are also windows between intimate worlds: they are among the tangents of racial affective capitalism. Professors Gupta and Mankekar’s research spanned almost a decade in Bengaluru, where transnational capitalism shapes and is shaped by a historically diverse workforce. The tech parks of the BPOs construct futurities and aspirations that provide critical insights into the imaginaries interwoven with transnational capitalism. This invisible labour is carried out at night, whilst colonial relations are both re-inscribed and altogether forgotten. What image of The West is painted from the end of that telephone line?

---

Seated comfortably in Professor Banerjee’s office, we sink into the sizable armchairs.  Professors Gupta and Mankekar immediately invoke an atmosphere of serenity with their absorbing comments and witty exchanges. This is an opportunity for us to delve into the nitty-gritties of their research and anthropological method, so we begin with their embodied experience of fieldwork.

In your seminar you touched on the corporeal cycles of life in the BPO Centre, and in ‘The Missed Period’ chapter you discuss the direct effect of this on the body. How did it feel going nocturnal with your interlocutors?

Prof Gupta: When we began this project our daughter was six years old, so there was a balance to be struck between the personal and professional. We couldn’t both go off in the middle of the night, so we largely took turns. The companies also couldn't afford for us to be talking to their agents on the shop floor: interviews infringed on labour time. Instead we held interviews off-site, on BPO agents’ days off. Management were actually happy to have us there - for them we might have provided solutions to increase efficiency and reduce worker turnover, and we were happy to share this information as we thought it might improve working conditions, though of course we never shared any personal or identifying information.  Before ours, there were a dozen books written on call centres, but almost none of them were done from inside a company. We had to sign NDAs…but quite frankly the kinds of human protocols that we have in anthropology are much stricter than any NDA.

Did you openly approach the companies as researchers, and were they receptive to this?

Prof Mankekar: Most companies were pretty open to it! Interestingly, even some of the managers were themselves curious about our work - they too were asking similar questions about the lives of their workers. 

Prof Gupta: They were very interested in how working in call centres changed agents’ lives. 

In our courses we have studied neoliberal development extensively, and how in South Asia especially, an entrepreneurial mindset is present in all modern companies. Did you encounter that? 

Prof Mankekar: It was manifest in some of the training. Agents were trained to think about their own development as a project, very much in the way that neoliberalism presumes: you know, the whole care of the self model. This might be why there was so much attention paid to demeanour, and what people wore. But it is also true that these neoliberal visions of the self did not seamlessly take over because there continued to be a real commitment to family and the larger community. They were by no means the ideal neoliberal subjects! 

Prof Gupta: It did make them entrepreneurial, but it's also an example of when context shapes capitalism; it's not simply the other way round.

BPO centres can be understood as new frontiers of capitalist accumulation, which we have come across in the work of David Harvey, and in a school of relatively modern Marxist anthropology. Where do you position yourselves along the scale of Marxist anthropology?

Prof Mankekar: I think we’re positioned in different places… why don’t you talk about where you sit [to Prof. Gupta], and then I’ll talk about where I sit. 

Prof Gupta: What’s distinctive about this project is it brings together discussions of racial capitalism and affective capitalism. For us this was essential following Harvey and others’ particular lack of attention to the logics of race in theories of capitalism. 

Prof Mankekar: I was informed by Marxist theorisations of culture  - Raymond Williams, Gramsci, Althusser, Stuart Hall - and simultaneously by Women of Colour Feminism in the United States. As somebody who moved to the US from India where our conception of race was very different, it was a real eye opener. Especially in relation to how I, as a woman of colour, was perceived in the classroom, and later when I joined the profession. It was very personal and  transformative. This allowed me to truly grasp racial capitalism from a feminist perspective. Working in a centre for Asian-American studies has really allowed me to push back against any Eurocentric, America-centric, or even an Atlanticist notion of race. It allowed me to examine: what does race look like in the Pacific? What does race look like in the context of settler colonialism? It's those two streams that have shaped me as a Marxist.

In the seminar, you talk about the idea of class/caste dynamics in an outsourcing system that seemingly transcends national borders. How do you situate the concept of ‘India Rising’ and nationalism in this situation?

Prof Mankekar: They are very closely linked. This idea of futurity and the future as articulated by call centre agents was very closely linked to India as a rising power. What was powerful for us to see was the suturing of individual aspiration with national aspiration. 

Prof Gupta: What was also interesting was how this nationalism existed in an explicitly transnational setting which produced intimate connections between different nations through the agent and the customer. For both the customer and the agent, more strident visions of nationalism don’t necessarily conflict with working for or helping those in another country. They don’t see it as contradictory that you could become a majoritarian Hindu on the one hand, and on the other you’re doing this service work for people who may be re-transcribing colonial relations. It’s a job! They don’t see it as opposing ideologies. I don’t think we found any friction there at all. Only that perhaps agents might be more inclined to be critical of the West. 

‘Shantiniketan Express’, Rahul Basu 2023.

Was there a desire on the part of managers and CEO’s to have a homogenised workforce, in  trying to think about this concept of ‘One Nation’, beyond religious boundaries?

Prof Mankekar: That’s a really good question! I don’t think that was on the radar of the managers at all. They were living at a cultural moment in which there was linguistic, class and religious conflict. So I think it would have been really naive for management to even think about a unified working body. That was just not on the horizon, and nor was there on the part of the managers a Hindu nationalist agenda. It was not manifest in the training, though it may have been manifest in their particular attitudes toward individuals. It was definitely not on the agenda to construct a kind of universal, ‘Pan Indian Body’. That was happening in other domains, but not necessarily in the BPOs. 

Prof Gupta: In Bangalore, people exist in a multilingual and multicultural context. For example, Kannada is the regional language, but it’s only spoken by a third or so of Bangalorians. People are there from all over the country.

Prof Mankekar: It has a history of a polyglot civic life; it’s not a new thing. The city is an actant: it is not outside, it permeates working life.

We were thinking about changing and mutating capitalism: that it doesn’t wipe out existing differences, but instead tends to transform them and be transformed by them. Do you think that the economic boom in India, especially in the tech industry, has been aided by the diversity of India? Is conjugated oppression in some way useful for this kind of capitalism?

Prof Mankekar: That is such a good question… in fact I wish I had pondered this before we wrote the book… I’d have to really think about that. I’ll say that the reason that we ended up in Bangalore is the chief minister had a vision of the area becoming a hub for IT, it was very much part of that regional policy. The history of scientific education and aeronautical engineering made Bangalore hospitable to the IT industry.

‘Untitled’, Rahul Basu 2023.

Prof Gupta: These industries each had their own call centre, and would start BPO’s in buildings adjacent to their IT centres. The places where there are no BPO’s are Chennai and Kerala. Possibly because they had communist governments who were not receptive to trans-national capitalism…..now of course, they are. With China leading the way, everyone is receptive to multi-national capital. When call centres first opened, there was definitely awareness about which kind of accents are desirable, or at least which accents were malleable to be changed. They would call this ‘MTI’ or Mother Tongue Influence.

We want to talk about another kind of mutation or possibility of mutation. We loved that your research was conducted in the span of 10 years, as a lot can change in a decade! So how did developments in technology and involvement of artificiality impact a space where you focus on contrasting tactile and tangible elements through embodiment?

Prof Mankekar: So there came a point in our research  when many of these companies were shifting to more automated processes. And that’s when we decided we wanted to stop the research, because we felt there was going to be a change in the way in which this work was occurring,  and we didn’t want to spread ourselves too thin. So huge change has occurred, and that’s going to be our next project which is going to be on AI, not AI in BPOs, not AI and labour,  but on AI and the algorithmic cultures that are being constructed.   

Prof Gupta: Even by the time we stopped our research,  there was a lot of machine learning and predictive analytic already happening. Chat boxes etc hadn’t been developed but other stuff was already happening. The CEO of one company told us that when somebody calls his company  he can predict the three most likely questions people are going to ask just from the phone number.

It feels like this topic is really related to David Graeber’s  ’bullshit jobs’, and how technology supposedly would ease our labour but instead ends up creating new efforts, frustrations and exhaustions. What are your thoughts on this new evolving technology and the possibilities and hopes it creates, and on the changing nature of labour itself for the BPO agents?

Prof Gupta:  So one of the ways in which labour had changed for BPO agents already by 2016-17, was that they were being heavily assisted by machine learning and predictive analytics. On their screens they were already getting advice about what they should say next to the caller or what,  based on the caller’s profile,  they should have said to the caller. 5 years ago this wasn’t the case.

The other thing about these technologies is that they have merged  web surfing, chat and calling. So when you are surfing the internet and you are looking at Sainsbury’s site  or some shop  and you spend more than a few minutes looking at it, depending on whether you had been a high-value customer in the past, the machines track how long you are taking, what you spent in the past and then they drop a balloon saying ‘can I help you?’ on the chat and they move you from one platform to another because they don’t want people to get frustrated by inefficient searching. So they try to help you find it sooner rather than let you get upset by wasting your time. That’s how technology changes the way customers interact with the company.

Prof Mankekar: In fact when I was sitting next to one of the agents, he had two screens. One with the complete profile of the person he was speaking to so he knew what they were like, that they lived alone or had a huge hospital bill so he knew what he was dealing with.

Moving on a bit, we really liked your use of the word futurity in your lecture. It seems that anthropology thinking about conceptualisations of the future is quite a new thing to do, but why do you think it is such an important framework? And also what are your thoughts on the term ‘solastalgia’? It’s a term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, but it’s been used by anthropologists to talk about ontological trauma caused by the lack of agency some people feel when their lived environments are changing very rapidly. It’s used by environmental anthropologists, but we think it can be applied to a lot more as it takes seriously the disruption of having unstable futures and considers that as traumatic.

Prof Manekekar: That’s so interesting, like the opposite of what we argue.

We did summer ethnography projects this year with grants from LSE. Ishani did hers in rural West Bengal [India], Lucy did hers in London, and Nazli in Istanbul. For Ishani, solastalgia was very helpful to understand that for some people, in the context of Adivasi youth,  a connection to the past and a more historicised sense of the self was helpful for them to also project themselves into the future. So for the BPO agents, did the fact that many of them migrated and had a disrupted sense of place affect the way they envisioned the future?  

Prof Mankekar: I wish we talked to you before we wrote the book!  Of course it did, in many ways. That’s why we use the metaphor of mapping. In many ways there was a sense that this kind of dislocation was something that required some kind of ethical map  for them to navigate this new  unfamiliar space; very daunting spaces that the workers now had to inhabit. So what were the different  kinds of ethical mapping that were available to them? 

The one we talk about the most is that of relationality, meaning the relations between them, between themselves and their families. This isn’t a romanticised notion of family, but whatever it was, oppressive or not, it provided them with a grid or a map to navigate this extremely new unfamiliar terrain. I guess the difference between how we envisioned this idea and the way you talk about it is that I wouldn’t use the word trauma because I don’t think it was traumatic, but it was for sure dislocating and disorienting. Even if they didn’t migrate physically from another state or another part of India, just the migration from their almost slum-like homes to these high-tech glassy tech parks, that in itself was a dislocating journey. That’s a very dislocating journey that a lot of them make regularly when they come to work. So, what kind of ethical map was available to them to navigate this? Relationality was the main thing, super important.

Our last question is related to Nazli’s fieldwork. Nazli focused on HIV related stigma and testing in everyday spaces, and conceptualised the body something that doesn’t finish with the skin, whose boundaries are blurred, and how health is impacted by fear. So what are the possibilities that thinking about the body in relation to space, or being one with space, provide for anthropological thinking?

Prof Gupta: So Harris Solomon’s book on ‘metabolic living’ explores exactly this question, of how the relationship between the body and the city is a permeable relation, how the city comes into the body and the body inhabits the city in a particular way. He uses the metaphor of metabolic living (metabolism) to think about that. So our way of thinking about it is that the body, the agent and relations are fundamentally spatially and socially expansive. The self is shaped by relations the agent is in, the kind of working conditions they are in, how they care for kin and so forth. We emphasise in the book that this is not about individuals. We don’t stress individualism (and this is how neoliberalism differs), people are entrepreneurial but they are not individuals in the same way.  

Prof Mankekar: That’s why the notion of affect is so useful. Because the skin doesn’t enclose the body. For example my body and this chair are constantly interacting with one another: my muscles are being shaped by this chair, it’s not separate from this chair.  

So we want to end with a fun question. In the event of an apocalypse, or if you found yourself in an eternal tech park, which three anthropologists  -  or cobras  -  would you keep by your side while you try to survive and why?

Prof Mankekar: Hahaha. I’m not sure that’s such a difficult question

Perhaps each other?

Prof Mankekar: Definitely. I also think Sylvia Yanagisako,  she has been a mentor to us and very formative in my thinking of family and kinship, so definitively Sylvia. Actually maybe Eric Wolf, from what Akhil has been telling me lately he sounds like an amazing, ethical good human being which I think would be very important to me

Prof Gupta: I would say Amitav Gosh - an anthropologist but novelist mostly. Maybe Catherine Stewart,  actually  maybe  Anne Alison more than Catherine Stewart who doesn’t work on affect  per se but whose work has been really wonderful. 

Thank you so much for talking to us! It’s been an honour. 

---

Mankekar and Gupta’s book will be published by Duke University Press, Forthcoming 2025.

This interview was joyfully conducted by Ishani Milward-Bose, Lucy Bernard and Nazlı Adıgüzel, transcribed by Iacopo Nassingh and Lucy Bernard. 

All images original works by Rahul Basu. More works found here.

Thank you to Professor Mukulika Banerjee for your encouragement. 

Lessons from Rojava

Image credits: Rojava Information Center (2022) celebration of International Woman’s day in Qamishlo [instagram]

By Iacopo Nassigh

Global-North commies’ extinction 

One thing us global-north left-wingers always tend to forget is that while in the last 50 years we have been sitting around and growing beards thinking that a revolution is impossible, it doesn’t mean that it has been the same in the rest of the world. Popular uprisings have been changing things up all around the world, showing that left-wing revolutions are not just a 20th century phenomenon. If one just looks at the last 15 years, several uprisings have dramatically challenged the status quo of world elites, from the Arab Spring all around the Middle East in the 2010s to the estadillo social in Chile (2019-2022).

Then, why, despite all of this, does revolutionary politics seem so far from the programs of the European Left, which is instead every day more prone to come down to compromises with the neoliberal establishment in the fear, often more supposed than real, to lose popular legitimacy? The question is extremely difficult, but my approximate answer would be that it comes down to a matter of what we have in mind when we think about democracy. I have the nerve to say that an anthropological viewpoint may suggest a way out of this situation. Indeed, as Graeber (2001) reminds us, what anthropology should be about is revealing that reality can be different from ours by looking at places in which it is. Anthropology should then give ‘power to the imagination’, as Graeber (ibid.) says, quoting a slogan from May 1968, roughly 50 years ago, roughly when in the Global North we stopped thinking left wing revolutions were possible.

Regarding our conceptions of democracy in the Global North, there is an elephant in the room. And the reason might be simpler than expected. As David Wengrow (2022) puts it, it may well be just a matter of racism. An embedded racism that, for example, blinds us when we celebrate Athenian democracy as the epitome of a functioning participatory democracy while it was probably no more than an imperialist state based on chattel slavery (ibid.). This same blindness prevents us from seeing how radical democracy is and has been successful in other places. Now, I will try and show that not only radical democracy is taking place, and probably originated as well1, outside of the Global North, but that by looking at its manifestations there, indefinite lessons can be understood about the State, the origin of inequality and ways to create a truly free society. In this sense, the Revolution in Rojava, officialy known as AANES (Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria), which has been developing amidst the Syrian Civil War since 2012 offers a fertile ground for thought. 

Rojava Information Center (2022) celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Rojavan Revolution [instagram]

A first lesson: ‘give to women what belongs to them’

The first lesson we should learn from the Rojava revolution is that class doesn’t have to be the only discriminated identity that makes a revolution start. It can be gender as well. Even more, the Rojava revolution holds that the origin of inequality should be found in the latter and not in the former. This line of thought needs to be traced back to the thought of Abdullah Öcalan, the theoretical mind behind the revolution and co-founder of the PKK2 (Kurdistan workers’ party), who was put in jail by the Turkish regime in 1999 and has been incarcerated ever since. In his thought, the main reason for the unequal and unfair state of the current capitalist society, embodied in Syria by the Assad regime, is to be located in the oppression of women as, in his own historical metanarrative, ‘the decline of society (…) began with the fall of women’ (Knapp et al., 2016: 40). 

However, this is no new argument at all. To say it better, it looks very similar to Engels’ (1884) famous argument3. Indeed, in what is probably Engels’ most well-known book he argues that in origins human society was regulated by a matriarchal and matrilineal principle that put women at the centre of society’s life and then all went wrong with the shift from nomadic to sedentary lifestyle which gave rise, in order, to private property, patriarchy and ultimately the State. One might say, and many actually do, that this argument is a bit simplistic and evolutionary; an example of 19th century anthropology that should be bypassed in order to pay attention to the uniqueness of every specific social arrangement. 

Nonetheless, students of Engels who have refined the argument are still around us. One of them is Chris Knight, co-founder of the RAG (Radical Anthropology Group), still operating in London at the moment. For him, primitive communism’s origins lie in the evolutionary step that brought humans to distinguish themselves from primates as a species. In particular, the first act of the revolution that led to an egalitarian society is for him the uprising of female primates against dominant and immobile males in order to ‘force the leisured sex to help in childcare for the first time’ (1991: 25) (emphasis in original text), allying with outcast male primates. The core of this alliance was a sex-for-meat agreement by which the game hunted by males was exchanged with females for sex, thus taking away potential sexual partners from the alpha male primates.

Nonetheless, Knight does not only follow Engels, but add something to it. What Knight adds is the centrality of the menstrual cycle in this shift away from the domination of the alpha male in social arrangements. Indeed, the menstrual cycle was, according to Knight, the biological clock around which the times of the couples’ disjoining and conjoining would alternate, since men would leave in order to hunt when their partners were menstruating, and the end of the hunt would coincide with the end of the females’ cycles. Considering the biological proven fact of menstrual cycle synchronisation among females living in proximity, the final effect of all this arrangement was the splitting and reuniting of the males and females all at the same time, leading thus to a society with two centres of power, male and female, balancing one another through the overarching time-scheduling principle of the female menstrual cycle. As the theory goes, this revolution brought into existence egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies which turned into patriarchal and sedentary societies, scared of the power of women and thus terrified by their menstrual blood.

What is peculiar about these arguments resonating with Öcalan’s ones is that they are often discarded by classic Marxist theory for which “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle” (Marx et al., 2008). Instead, what the Rojava revolution has done is taking this seriously, stating in facts that there was a struggle before class struggle to solve: the one between genders. A ‘science of women’, Jineolojî 4 was thus created by the revolutionary forces in Rojava to address this core inequality. The main idea of Jineolojî is that ‘knowledge and science are disconnected from society (and from women especially) - they are a monopoly controlled by dominant groups, used as a foundation for their power’ (Knapp et al., 2016: 71). What it aims to do is thus giving ‘women and society access to science and knowledge and to strengthen the connections of science and knowledge to society’ (ibid.), to re-embed them to where they originally belonged as an anthropologist would put it. 

What Jineolojî has meant on the ground, even for the most sceptical observers of the revolution5, is a dramatic repositioning of women in society through their direct political participation. In Rojava the principle of dual leadership, by which there should be two leaders (one of whom must be a woman) in any political assembly, applies at every level of political organisation. Moreover, every assembly must have at least 40% (in multiple instances they are actually more) women in it. But this is not all of it. At an extremely localised level, often the neighbourhood one, there is a ‘Women’s House (Mala Jinan), ‘an all-female house where women’s autonomy is discussed’ (Nordhag, 2021: 16), women’s peace committees that investigate cases of gender-based domestic violence, women’s education and research centres where ‘women bring their family and social dilemmas (…) and find solutions by talking with other women’ (Knapp et al., 2016: 70) while at the same time being taught about ‘computer use, language, sewing, first aid, and children’s health, and culture and art’ (ibid.). On top of all this, there is the YPJ (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin), the all-female women’s protection units, an armed body led by women in which they protect their lands and families, and now world famous for their fight against the IS.

Rojava Information Center (2022) meeting of a commune in the city of Qamishlo [website: https://rojavainformationcenter.com/2022/07/10-years-of-the-rojava-revolution-much-achieved-still-much-to-come/]

Thus, the Rojava revolution is showing the world a radical and successful feminism in which the key to women’s liberation is giving back to women the knowledge that has been taken away from them, creating female-only organs that can do this following the guideline concept of woman-to-woman solidarity as the basis of women’s (and thus everyone’s) liberation. However, as the shared metanarrative goes, women’s freedom and power are put in danger by the State, the ultimate masculinist construct. Thus, in order to protect women’s freedom the revolution had to replace the State with something else.

A second lesson: ‘The origins of the commune, cooperative and democratic confederalism’: Engels today

It is in its refusal of the State as we know it that the Rojavan revolution gives us a second lesson. Indeed, what Öcalan’s political theory, called democratic confederalism, the political ideology governing Rojava political life, wants to do is addressing the inherent oppressive nature of the Nation-State. The core idea behind democratic confederalism is one of total integration between political society and civil society in a bottom-up fashion. To put it in Öcalan’s words ‘confederalism proposes political self-administration in which all groups of the society and all cultural identities express themselves in local meetings, general conventions, and councils. Such a democracy opens political space for all social strata and allows diverse political groups to express themselves. In this way it advances the political integration of society as a whole. Politics becomes part of everyday life’ (Öcalan quoted in Knapp et al., 2016: 43). From the level of the commune to the one of the country thus the assembly has become in Rojava the main form of collective decision-making, trying to dismantle collective life as we know it in the Nation-State. But what is ultimately wrong about the State? 

For simplicity, let’s just take the definition of State by Encyclopaedia Britannica “a territorially bounded sovereign polity—i.e., a state—that is ruled in the name of a community of citizens who identify themselves as a nation”. Thus, the nation-state is a ‘territorial bounded’ unity. What does this imply? It implies the drawing of neat borders that mark off a specific area, making it ‘bounded’. However, who are these neat borders for? Nobody needs a neat delineation of a geographical space if the relationship they have with that territory is not one of possession, or to say it better, of capitalist exploitation. The people who want boundaries are colonisers, rulers or landlords, not subsistence peasants. Borders have historically emerged as a way to assert domination over land within the typically western and moreover, historically typically masculine, binary between nature and culture. State’s borders are just taken-for-granted manifestations of this logic. In this vein, Nation-States have been successfully represented in propaganda in the form of a wedding (a non-consensual one I’d say), between ‘Father State and Motherland’ (Delaney, 1995: 187), the male ‘cultural’ dominator and the female ‘natural’ territorial victim of this domination. 

The Rojava revolution dramatically challenges this ‘territorial boundedness’. What instead leads the way is Bookchin’s theory of social ecology (2006), the idea that links ‘the fate of ecological society to that of a revolutionary political project of local direct democracy’ (Hammy and Miley, 2022), stemming from Bookchin’s conviction that ‘our present-day ecological dislocations have their basic sources in social dislocations’ (Bookchin quoted in ibid.). Thus, human-nature co-dependence has informed the practice of the revolution. Cooperatives established in Rojava have ever since the beginning of the revolution tried to paradigmatically change the ‘territorial bounded’ nature of North-eastern Syrian landscape, transforming wheat and olives monocultures in fields hosting a wide range of vegetables (Rojava information Center, 2020) By crushing the boundaries of monocultures and those of strict individual possession and boundedness, the very basic principle of ‘boundedness’ that underpins capitalist exploitation and the Nation-State is at danger.

Rojava Information Center (2020) workers of the Umceren cooperative (Heseke countryside) are drying up bricks to construct a school for the local community [website: https://rojavainformationcenter.com/2020/11/explainer-cooperatives-in-north-and-east-syria-developing-a-new-economy/]

Going back to our definition, a nation-state is also a ‘sovereign polity (…) ruled in the name of a community of citizens’, but here as well the question of boundaries is a central one. Who is included in the ‘sovereign polity’? From Agamben (1998) we know that the ultimate characteristic of sovereignty is to distinguish between ‘bare life’ and ‘political life’, and isn’t this distinction historically and ideologically in the western polity, a distinction between men and women, ethnic majority and minorities? Indeed, historically women didn’t get only citizenship rights later, but their exclusion was part of the process by which men acquired citizenship as representatives of the entire family (Vogel in Yuval-Davis, 1998: 24). At the same time, are not the members of the nation’s ethnic majority often distinguished ethnically from the rest of the population, as bearers of some sort of ‘ethnic genius’ (Appadurai, 2006: 3)?

Rojava challenges these, one might say, ‘original exclusions’ at the base of the State project. I have talked about the centrality of women in the revolution, empowered in being protagonists of the holistic revolutionary project. However, in the many camps that occupy the Rojavan territory, ethnic boundaries (often neatly stressed across the region) are blurred. Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds have learnt to live side by side, revealing how the camp, instead of what predicted by Agamben (1998), can be a space for political participatory and inclusive activity (Bishara2017), where people have to collaborate to create a liveable future also through economic cooperatives, such as the one south of Tel Abyad (Broomfield 2023).

Thus, what Rojava is attempting to do is dismantling of the State and its inherent oppression stemming from its intrinsic boundedness and exclusion. This is not just revolutionary, this is even beyond Marx’s whole economic determinism. Indeed, the Rojavan revolution does not just say that gender comes before class but that the political comes before the economic. Turning their back to the dictatorship of the proletariat, Rojavans take seriously Clastres’ (1974) genius intuition that the original source of oppression does not come from economic division but from the existence of the State without which even class society would not be possible. As the argument goes, it is the centralisation of both power and wealth brought by the State that prevents people from just producing for subsistence and thus being in egalitarian relationships to one another. Thus, abolishing the State as overarching structure means abolishing, or considerably reducing, the risk of patriarchal authoritarianism within the revolutionary government. There is no Lenin or Mao in the Rojava revolution that can take over and transform a popular revolution in an oppressive, party-led, chauvinist regime. Instead, at the moment there are two co-presidents leading the revolution, Îlham Ehmed, female and Kurd, and Mansur Selum, male and Arab.

However, this statelessness nature of the revolution should not be confused with a return to some sort of Engels’ ‘primitive communism’. Instead, what the Rojava revolution does is creating a stateless contemporaneity, embedded in the long history of entanglements of the Kurdsish people, and the Middle-East at large with the global capitalist, colonialist, world. Indeed, the Rojava revolution is a late capitalist one, a revolution at the margins of the capitalist Empire, in an area oppressed and torn by conflicts caused by political interests of European superpowers, most notably from WWI mandates’ system and the Syrian and Turkish dictatorships now. From the destruction of war, a revolutionary life has emerged trying to pursue ‘collaborative survival’ (Tsing, 2015: 2) at the margins of the State and capitalist modernity.

Camps people are forced to live in, not academics theorise about: Agamben in the real world

Thus far what I have depicted may look like a socialist utopia but the reality is of course much more complex. As I have already mentioned, a lot of people in Rojava live in camps due to the displacement caused by the numerous military invasions, by the Turkish forces and the IS in particular. On the economic side, the general material conditions are often extreme. Indeed, as it has been the case of Cuba for more than 60 years, Rojava has been subjected to a heavy blockade by Turkey which renders many essential goods scarce and often, non-existent. Thus, often smugglers that follow an entrepreneurial logic are tolerated to keep the population using some essential goods, inaccessible in any other way (Broomfield, 2023). As many observers suggest, fossil fuel revenues are still the ones which provide the basic income of most of the population, as cooperatives are not as widespread as the revolutionaries would like them to be (Broomfield, 2023; Hammy and Miley, 2022).

On the political side, the shortcomings are multiple. People document how the discussion in the communes are often not as participatory and radical as auspicated as people sometimes go there to collect their rations rather than engaging in political action (Broomfield, 2023). Or even more worryingly, people sometimes are scared to express their opinion or feel that they do not count if they are not close to YPD members, the branch of the PKK with a leading role in the revolution (Hammy and Miley 2022). On the other hand, the revolution, being under a constant military siege on multiple sides, deeply depends on top-down military units, hindering the autonomy of the communes.

On another more theoretical level the Rojava revolution has worried left-wingers for one specific reason that I already mentioned: it is not mainly about class. As Graeber puts it ‘economic capital had been partly expropriated, social capital had been somewhat rearranged, but cultural capital – and particularly class habitus – had barely been affected’, concluding that ‘unless these structures are directly addressed, they will always tend to reassert themselves’ (2016: xix). However, one could say, what is cross-class solidarity there for if we do not accept that ingrained cultural capital is not strictly co-related with social antagonism to someone with a different class habitus? Could social and political class-solidarity be stronger than cultural differences between classes? Isn’t the idea of class homogenisation on a cultural level one that has had a controversial history in past, self-proclaimed ‘communist’, revolutions?  The matter is complex, and I do not have an answer to these questions, but dismissing the revolution as doomed to fail because of this seems too simplistic to me.

At the end of the day, as everything human-made, the Rojavan revolution is highly imperfect. However, what seems saving it from its own self-destruction is one amazing detail: the awareness of this imperfection. Indeed, Öcalan himself sees self-critique as an essential part of the revolutionary process and this is widespread among the revolutionaries’ discussions at every level, to the point in which the revolution has been called a ‘self-critical’ one (Aslan, 2021: 333).  As long as the revolution stays this way, it has the potential to improve. As dogmas and States go hand in hand, Rojava will remain the best example of an Anti-State holistic revolution, which makes of the intersectionality of its battles its point of strength. It may be the best model we currently have to give ‘power to the imagination’, to start the ‘war of imagination’ as Graeber also used to say, changing our imagination about possible futures and changing what we think about when we think of democracy. Maybe the first step in this way could be, when we hear the word democracy, to think before anything else about the words said by a revolutionary woman to David Graeber when leaving Rojava. While he was apologising about not having brought more goods with him, she said “Don’t worry about that too much (…) I have something that no one can give me. I have my freedom. In a day or two you have to go back to a place where you don’t have that. I only wish there was some way I could give what I have to you’ (Graeber, 2016: xxii). 

Notes

1. Uncountable authors have shown how it is very likely that the birth of democracy took place outside of what we consider the Global North. Interesting for this article is Öcalan’s Prison Writings. The roots of Civilisation (2007).

2. The PKK has been active since the 80s in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. In 2003 The PYD (Democratic Union Party has been founded) as a Syrian branch of the PKK. To this day, the PYD is the party leading the revolution in Rojava.

3. The argument can be found in ‘The origins of the family, private property, and the State’ (1884)

4. The Kurdish word jin means ‘woman’, olojî derives from the Greek for ‘knowledge’ the word Jin is also related to the Kurdish concept jiyan, which means ‘life’.

5. As in everything, also the Rojava revolution has its detractors. However, even Schmidinger (2018) documents how people’s opinions over women’s liberation in Rojava is highly positive.

Bibliography

- Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.

- Appadurai, Arjun (2006) Fear of Small Numbers: an Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press. 

- Aslan, A. (2021), Economía anticapitalista en Rojava. Las contradicciones de la revolución en la lucha kurda. Guadalajara, México: Cátedra Interinstitucional Universidad de Guadalajara-CIESAS-Jorge Alonso.

- Bishara, Amahl (2017) “Sovereignty and popular sovereignty for palestinians and beyond.” Cultural Anthropology, 32 (3), pp. 349–358, 

- Bookchin, Murray (2007), Social Ecology and Communalism. AK Press.

- Broomfield, Matt (2023) ‘Is Rojava a Socialist Utopia?’, Unheard, https://unherd.com/2023/03/is-rojava-a-socialist-utopia/ 

- Clastres, Pierre (1987), Society against the State : Essays in Political Anthropology. Zone Books.

- Delaney, Carol Lowery (1995) ‘Father State, Motherland, and the birth of modern Turkey’ in Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, Carol Lowery, Delaney (eds.), Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis. London: Routledge.

- Engels, Frederich (1884) The origin of the family, private property and the State

- Graeber, David (2001) Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. Palgrave Macmillan US.

- Hammy C and Miley TJ (2022) ‘Lessons From Rojava for the Paradigm of Social Ecology’, Front. Polit. Sci. 3:815338 

- Knapp, Michael, et al. (2016), Revolution in Rojava : Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan. PlutoPress.

- Knight, Christopher (1991) Blood Relations : Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. Yale University Press, 1991. 

- Marx, Karl, et al. (2008) The Communist Manifesto. Pluto Press.

- Nordhag, Anders (2021) ‘Exploring peace in the midst of war: Rojava as a zone of peace?’ in Journal of Peacebuilding & Development. 16(1), 9-23, 2021.

- Rojava Information Center (2020) ‘Explainer: Cooperatives in North and East Syria – developing a new economy’ https://rojavainformationcenter.com/2020/11/explainer-cooperatives-in-north-and-east-syria-developing-a-new-economy/ 

- Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.

- Yuval-Davis, Nira (1998) ‘Gender and Nation’ in Wilford, Rick, et al (eds.), Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism: the Politics of Transition. London: Routledge, pp. 21-31.

-Wengrow, David, ‘The early history of humanity: we have never been stupid (until now?)’, 2 November 2022, LSE. Lecture

Madonna and Madonna: The Politics of Finding God in the post-modern world

by Inayah Inam

Still from ‘The Rapture’ (1991)

Michael Tolkien’s 1991 film ‘The Rapture’ follows a telephone operator stumbling on an evangelical sect in an office break room, who believes ‘The Rapture’ (Judgement Day) is near. The film shows how the Christian desire for salvation still surrounds us today, despite the tendency to depict our age as secular. Contemporary Christian sentiments are underpinned by political contexts, embedded in wider political phenomena such as decolonisation and globalisation. An interesting site to look at how religious sentiments are underpinned by such politics are religious apparitions because of their nature as crossroads between several political actors in the church such as church’s institutions, followers and correspondent geographical areas; a church’s core and periphery.  

In ‘Mother Figured’ (2015) De La Cruz writes about religion in postcolonial times. She recounts the incidence of the ‘Marian Apparitions’ after World War II in the Philippines and traces the legacy of a hierarchical (and elitist) Catholic Church, resistant to legitimising these divine miracles as they did not fit the established and Eurocentric framework of legitimate miracles. One of the first apparitions, The Lipa miracles (1948), during which the Virgin Mary appeared to a nun in the Carmelite Monastery Teresita, can be read as a post-colonial critique of church, state and the supernatural. What constitutes the extra-ordinary or ‘divine’ in this case of this apparition raises ideas about what constitutes religious legitimacy and gendered ideas of ecclesiastical credibility. De La Cruz particularly elaborates on the gendered experiences of devotional subjects, and the invalidation of Teresita’s claims by the church. Teresita’s testimony was dismissed as “pure imaginations” (2015:255). I argue the discreditation of Teresita’s claims were patronisingly discarded on the grounds of misogyny and sexism. 

However, an apparition’s effects are not totally determined by the church. Although their legitimacy may be established by the church’s hierarchy, they can also be understood as ‘spectacles', having effects on the collective imaginary at a grassroots level. De La Cruz notes that in another set of apparitions in the Philippines, the ‘Agoo Apparitions’ of 1993, the material spectacle of the weeping Mary Statute captured the public devotional spirit with an onset of religious devotees and curious onlookers who descended on the town. This phenomenon transcended usual social divisions deeply marked in Philippines’ everyday social life, as it attracted working-class people alongside “Filipinos of the highest status and celebrity” (De La Cruz 2015: 2). The upsurge in religious mobilisation and participation notably at Mass and devotional practices alludes to the potency of the religious spectacle and the symbolism of Mary as “a transcendent figure with a singular identity (2015:7). This finds parallels in other ‘unifying’ and universal religious figures which carry political capital as well as religious capital. For instance, this is the case in Islam for Imam Mahdi, a messianic figure reported to be a ‘saviour’ who will be sighted near the end of times. News of potential sightings of this figure gathers attention widely in the Islamic world and there have been multiple claimants to the title. The sighting of these religious apparitions should be examined particularly as a ‘postmodern phenomenon’ (Vasquez, Manuel A, Marquardt Marie F. 2000). According to Pelikan (1996), almost 50 apparitions have occurred since 1980, in places as diverse as the USA, Nicaragua, Brazil, Rwanda and Australia. The proliferation of Marian apparitions can be situated in the “complex process involving the global creation of the local” (Featherstone and Lash, 1995: 4), whereby traditional local religious practices and dis-courses enter large-scale dynamics like worldwide Church politics, such as the Vatican's New Evangelization project, all of this being mediated by globalised media like Internet and TV. 

Madonna in her controversial music video ‘Like a Prayer’

De La Cruz’s examination of Christian apparitions in the Philippines remind me of a similar controversial event on the other side of the world which garnered the disapproval of the Catholic Church - Madonna’s 1989 “Like A Prayer” music video which depicted a black man being wrongfully arrested for the murder of a white woman. Madonna, witnessing the falsity of the accusation, prays to a ‘black saint’ resembling the individual and later frees him. The video engages in a vigorous spectacle of religious ecstasy, interracial love, and anti-racist politics. The lyrics “When you call my name, It's like a little prayer, I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there” are riddled with innuendos and present an over-frenzied, feminine display of religious passion. Although Madonna’s reputation as a controversial popstar who relishes in the publicity machine of outrage and provocation was bashfully fun in the Western media, the subject matter still offers a mirror to the Philippines’ mediatisation’s of religiosity in 1990s. 

Funnily enough, Madonna’s Rebel Heart World Tour in 2016 which stopped in Manilla, was described as the “work of the Devil” by a Catholic newspaper. "Why is the Catholic Philippines the favourite venue for blasphemy against God and the Holy Mother?” (2016) is what a Filipino archbishop at the time Ramon Arguelles posted on the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines' official website. I think the irony can’t be overstated when a Filipino Catholic institution attacks a performer called ‘Madonna’, who adopts the name of Mary Mother of Jesus for her art. Thus, Madonna’s, much like Teresita’s, devotional display, deeply embedded in a gendered dynamic, is being left out by what is defined as ‘religiously legitimate’ by the Catholic Church. However, if as devotional displays Teresita’s and Madonna’s acts are deemed ‘illegitimate’ they remain, despite their controversy, in the public imagination. 

These religious displays that straddles an uneasy balance between institutional delegitimization and public visibility bring to the fore the question on truth, typical in the postmodern era. As De La Cruz notes, “how important is the truth?” (2015:145). The hierarchy of Catholic devotion in which at the top lies the Vatican’s approval and at the bottom is conspiracy or fiction, syncretic or folk embodiments of Catholicism exist in an uneasy ambiguity. This tension between sanction and scepticism, demonstrates the reality where due to critical media and political discourse, objective truths and absolutes are not so easily accepted. Online mediums, the proliferation of social media, allow people to debate, discuss and form narratives where everything is just a matter of subjective perspective. The church who didn’t validate Teresita’s apparition’s, nevertheless fed into the culture of folk catholic mysticism in the Philippines, as part of a wider experiment in religious ‘glocalization’ (Vasquez, Marquardt 2000). If religion is being re-imagined, re-localised and re-constructed for those originally ‘compliant’ masses who are modern subjects of a globalised world, where does the line end for experiences ‘worthy of belief’?

Bibliography

DE LA CRUZ, D. (2015). Mother figured : Marian apparitions and the making of a Filipino universal. Chicago, [Illinois], The University of Chicago Press.

FEATHERSTONE, M, LASH, S, (1995). Globalization, Modernity, and the Spatialization of Social Theory: An Introduction, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds) Global Modernities. London: Sage.

PELIKAN, J J. (1996) Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

TAN, L (2016), CNN.  Archbishop warns Filipinos vs. Madonna concert: 'Avoid occasions of sin'. Available online, https://www.cnnphilippines.com/entertainment/2016/02/24/Madonna-Rebel-Heart-tour-Manila-boycott-CBCP.html, accessed online 14 December 2022

VASQUEZ, M. A, MARQUADT M. F. (2000). Globalizing the Rainbow Madonna: Old Time Religion in the Present Age. Theory, culture & society. 17, 119–143.

Intimacy Economies and Reality Dating TV Shows

Reality Dating TV shows have captured the attention of the general public and academia alike. Infused with entertaining conversations, beautiful bodies and details into personal life, there is something in these shows for everyone. Many dating reality TV shows have received the same critiques that other reality TV has, described as vapid, silly, and superficial. But academia has shown that shows like this filled with false realities have small nuggets of ‘truth’, not just in their content but in their continued existence. Although seemingly distanced from reality, they reflect societal attitudes to romantic relationships and more.

The hyper-surveillance in many of these shows makes the audience into something akin to an anthropologist observing the field site and the behaviour of participants. ‘Love Island’ itself perfected this formula, placing a group of strangers into one villa with nothing to do but get to know other participants, whilst their interactions are streamed on TV. A ‘Love Island’ hierarchy is created in these mini societies, at the top of which there are the ‘strongest couples’ and the most liked contestants within the villa. The beauty standards and behaviours that dictate this hierarchy replicate those which we see in the real world, as Eurocentric and heteronormative beauty standards shape contestants' dating habits and performances. What is also intriguing about these shows is their embeddedness in the wider capitalist context. The contradiction of being part of a profit-making industry yet simultaneously trying to portray love as removed from this is reflected in the participants’ attempts to disguise their motivations for participating in the shows. With prize money awarded to the favourite couples, contestants who show monetized motivations for wanting to win come across to audiences and fellow contestants as distasteful. Perhaps this highlights our inability to realize that money does often dictate our pursuits of love. ‘Love Island’ as a dating show started with the intention of making money, and the participants behaviours can’t be understood outside of this framework.

Love does not exist detached from a capitalist society, as it is embedded within it and shaped by it. The commodification of love propels consumerism and props up the entertainment and media industry. In terms of consumerism, jewellery brands often utilise public conceptions of romance to sell products. Major holidays like Christmas and Valentine’s Day propel the idea that love can be bought through gifting commodified products. Moreover, the romance film and tv industry has utilised romantic themes to keep audiences’ attention. Netflix shows like ‘Bridgerton’ combine the popularity of romance in fiction and the periodical film genre to capture our attention and keep us consuming. The ‘golden age of rom-coms’ from the 90s to the early 2000s brought in massive amounts of profits for mid-budget feature films. Notions of romance leak into almost every film genre within the entertainment industry, from dystopian films to murder mysteries. Romance is likely to be integrated into these stories because of its ability to capture the audience's attention.

The show ‘Too Hot To Handle’, adds a fascinating spin to dating reality tv shows. The financial reward element is still strong, but punishment is also introduced. This punishment aspect is through the form of fines placed upon the contestants who act upon their sexual desires, so that sexual touching, kissing, sex, and self-gratification are banned. If they are caught on camera doing any of these things large amounts of money will be deducted from the prize fund. This aspect of the show can be both problematic and comical in that the contestants end up policing the sexual activities of one another. When individuals deviate from the rules, it's the responsibility of the group as a whole to discipline them for disobeying the rules of the retreat. If they don’t conform, they are kicked off the show. These rules about sexual behaviour in ‘Too Hot To Handle’ portray a popular theme, namely that withholding sexual intimacy is what creates meaningful connections. Within western societies, it is common to distinguish between sexual and meaningful relationships, stemming perhaps from a masculine idealisation of the need to discipline the body and natural urges to have a successful lifestyle. In such ideal lifestyle sexual temptations are erased or limited to a secluded sphere, while, often homosocial, relationships are valued as the essential ones. Take the idea of having sex on the first date - this is a debate that is constantly brought up when discussing dating habits. There is an assumption that having sex on the first date means that you cannot take the relationship seriously because it is purely sexual and not emotional. It reinforces the notion that ‘having sex too quickly’ weakens one's ability to create a long-lasting connection.

A picture of the cast of the second season of ‘Too Hot To Handle’

More than anything these shows reinforce pre-existing body and beauty standards rooted in heteronormative ideals. The men in the shows tend to have heavily muscular bodies, and gyms are installed within the villa to accommodate this. For women in this show, a slender body is essential, whilst emphasis on curves and hair colour is imperative. Hyperfocus on bodily details is another aspect of this, highlighted in the fact that when women enter the scenes, cameras zoom in on their bums and legs. When men enter, the focus is similarly on their stomachs and arms. Women and men are also separated, reinforcing heteronormativity. In the mornings men and women separate to debrief on the state of their relationships so far. Women get ready in dressing rooms whilst the men get ready in the bedrooms. Every arrangement is thus underlain by a strong distinction between men and women. When everyone gets ready for dates, the tradition stands that the girls descend the staircase whilst the guys stand and watch. The women are presented and displayed to the men, reinforcing the male gaze on feminine bodies and portraying men as objectifying agents.

As an avid watcher of these types of shows, I always find it interesting how societal issues manifest in these isolated villas that insist that they are detached from the outside world. It is clear however that these shows actually reproduce aspects of the intimacy economy at play in our wider society and operate as magnifying glasses into details of our Eurocentric, heteronormative and capitalist world.

Constructing Power: The Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the UAE

Constructing Power: The Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the UAE

by Daniel Guthrie

McQue, K. (2020) Social distancing is impossible in the cramped living quarters of Dubai’s labour camps, The Guardian. Dubai: The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/03/i-am-starving-the-migrant-workers-abandoned-by-dubai-employers

The Qatar World Cup made the treatment of migrant labourers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) a topic of global discussion. From the widely circulated Guardian article claiming 6,500 migrant workers had died since Qatar had been deemed hosts in 2010 (Pattison, 2021), to FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s baffling assertion on the eve of the tournament that he feels ‘like a migrant worker’ (Page, 2022), the plight of the migrant labourer outside the West has perhaps never had this much attention. Whilst it is Qatar that has received the most recent coverage, it is the UAE which has the largest catalogue of discourse on the issue, over the longest span of time. The issue is especially pressing given the number of migrant workers within the UAE – estimates consistently put migrant labourers as around 90% of the UAE workforce, with some 500,000 of those being construction workers (Sönmez et al., 2013). To grasp why this exploitation is so prevalent, there needs to be an understanding of both the unique systems of labour management and worker treatment that operate within the UAE, and an understanding of theories relating the power over death. Elements of Foucault’s concept of biopower (especially regarding anatomo-politics) and Berlant’s concept of slow death will be utilised to locate power in the government-employer-migrant construction worker relation, ascertaining what has led to the current situation of exploitation that is now under the global spotlight.  

The positionality of the migrant construction labourer

Firstly, the position of migrant labourers must be understood. Migrants enter the GCC’s labour market through the kafala system. Within this structure, migrants must be sponsored by a specific employer to gain a work contract, enter the state, and obtain a residence. To afford transit, funds are borrowed or generated by the sale of homes or livestock (Sönmez et al., 2013). In most of the cases this obviously creates an enormous financial pressure on the labourer since they often find themselves with huge debts and with a family reliant on their work at home. Debts can be as high as US$4000; an unsettling figure when construction workers receive, on average, the equivalent of US$175 a month (Ghaemi, 2006: 7). Most significantly for the discussion of power, the kafeel (sponsor) is essentially wholly responsible for the worker. They dictate their employment and residency, have the responsibility to inform authorities of changes to the contract, and can even restrict workers mobility or changes to employment (Ngeh & Pelican, 2018: 172). The government of the UAE has made a large part of the governing of migrant workers the responsibility of employers. 

The Kafala system is widely regarded as corrupt, so much so that Bahrain, another country in the GCC, prohibited it in 2009 – the minister of labour referring to it as “not differ[ing] much from the system of slavery” (Mahdi, 2009). Postcolonial philosopher Achille Mbembe defined the state of the slave as “a triple loss: loss of a “home,” loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status” (Mbembe, 2003: 21). Migrants under the kafala system leave their home and move into their employer’s labour camp. Their employer has near-total power over the movements and existence of their employees. They will often find their passports confiscated, under the guise of this being customary within the kafala system (Sönmez et al., 2013); in reality, it is to control their movements and ensure they do not attempt to return home.  

Further control is exerted in several ways. A significant method is the retaining of workers’ pay, an issue that has led to numerous strikes, some involving hundreds of workers over six months unpaid wages (Dajani, 2021). Given the immense financial pressure on migrant labourers, this can be destructive to their lives at home, and this immense power can be exercised on the employer’s whim. Migrants have no voting rights in the UAE, as the government selects which citizens can vote in each election, and citizenship is exclusively reserved for nationals, or specific expats. Additionally, employers purposefully aim to hire labourers who cannot speak Arabic, so they cannot read the contracts they sign, or even converse with non-migrants (ICFUAE, 2019: 9); some go further, and hire from a wide range of countries and locations so that their workers cannot communicate (ICFUAE, 2019: 9). The labour camps set up to house migrants are located on the peripheries, so that they are geographically segregated from the privileged classes of the UAE (Hamza, 2015: 90). They report feeling socially excluded from entering parks and shopping centres, saying they are “not people of the city, we live in a labor camp” (Hamza, 2015: 101). Migrant workers experience a holistic loss of bodily autonomy and personhood as they are created as a disposable population. Their conditions are more akin to slavery than free employment. 

Where the government does play a role in the wellbeing of construction labourers, it is often insufficient. The law governing workplaces is the UAE Federal Law No. 8 of 1980 (colloquially referred to as the ‘Labour law’), and it is enforced by the Ministry of Labour. The Labour Law explicitly prohibits unionising and striking (Federal Supreme Council, 1980), criminalising any preventative measures by workers to effectively ensure the enforcement of their legal rights. The Ministry of Labour is responsible for ensuring regulations are followed by both employers and employees; however, in 2006 it was reported that “140 government inspectors were responsible for overseeing the labor practices of more than 240,000 businesses employing migrant workers” (Ghaemi, 2006; pg. 6). Construction businesses number around 6,000 (Seghedoni, 2017), meaning that, proportionally, there are less than 4 inspectors for the inspection of every aspect of a construction industry which employs more than 500,000 workers. Furthermore, these inspectors  are mainly concerned with the residential situation of the workers, and workplace concerns and hazards are not prioritised (ILO, 2010). There are no standardised labour inspection procedures (ILO, 2010).  

Picture 1: A foreign worker waits for the company's bus service to take him home after a day at work (2006) Building Towers, Cheating Workers. London, London: HRW

Picture 2: Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2022, December 8). Burj Khalifa. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Burj-Khalifa

Working conditions in the UAE are dire. During the construction of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, the average worker worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (ICFUAE, 2019: 11). Death of migrant workers is a common occurrence. The story of Julhas Uddin, a migrant labourer who died when he was instructed to enter a sewage line without an oxygen cylinder (McQue, 2022), is no outlier. One report found that between 2010 and 2019, an average of 5866 non-nationals from south and southeast Asia have been dying every year in the UAE (Vital Signs, 2022: 25). Whilst not all of these would’ve been construction labourers, and not all of these may have been in the workplace, several factors must be considered: construction is the most dangerous position they will be employed for; migrant workers are often younger than 40, so the chances of them dying of ‘old age’ are small; and just because a worker didn’t die on site, it does not mean that unsafe working conditions, e.g. working with dangerous chemicals or no filter masks, did not cause or lead to their death. This report also doesn’t account for migrant labourers from Africa, a growing demographic. Perhaps more shockingly, “1 out of every 2 deaths is effectively unexplained… instead using terms such as “natural causes” or “cardiac arrest”” (Vital Signs, 2022: 26). In addition to this, there are many unrecorded deaths, meaning the actual figures are likely higher than the documented 5866 a year. It is apparent that the bureaucratic structure has such disregard for the lives of migrant labourers that even their deaths are regarded as of little importance. Furthermore, there are no official figures on workplace injuries; however, it is certain that they are even more commonplace. 

Thus, the positionality of the migrant construction worker is one of near-constant peril. Under immense financial pressure, they are stripped of their identifying documents, and placed in high-risk, low-wage work, where their rights border on non-existent, and they are legally prohibited from mobilising. There is no free market in the UAE – due to the kafala system, they cannot leave their employer to join a competitor, meaning the employer can treat them however they please. The government has apathy for their wellbeing, from washing its hands of many bureaucratic duties, to a woefully inefficient inspection structure. Prohibitions on mobilising, and ineffective and poorly organised modes of inspection, lead to situations where employers have almost total discretion as to the treatment of their employees, and employees are powerless to resist. They cannot even be trusted to give an accurate account of death, a consequence of workplace abuse which looms over the construction workers, higher even than the glittering cityscape they are building.  

The death of the migrant construction labourer

For a complete analysis of the power that employers exert over their employees, the most insightful analytic will be a synthesis of two theories relating to power and death. The first will be aspects of Foucault’s theory of biopolitics - power as being a ‘right of seizure’, the justification of death as “on behalf of the existence of everyone” (Foucault, 1978: 137) and “the anatomo-politics of the human body” (Foucault, 1978: 139). The second will be Berlant’s theory of ‘slow death’- “the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience” (Berlant, 2007: 754). Berlant’s framework essentially fills in the gaps of Foucault when dealing with oppressive systems that have become the norm for certain populations.  

Reading Foucault in accordance with the exploitation of migrant labourers provides a useful understanding of the development of gaining power. The right of seizure is the right to seize “things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (Foucault, 1978: 136). As demonstrated above, employers in the UAE both actively (through the kafala system, the retaining of passports and the inhumane workload) and passively (through spatial containment and social isolation) seize control over the personhood of the migrant construction worker. Their deaths are deemed to be a non-event – ‘natural causes’ is scrawled as the reason for death, and there is always another worker to take their place. This right of seizure is demonstrated by employers and condoned by the government.  

Foucault’s theory that death is justified as ‘on the behalf of everyone’ must be skewed slightly for this subject. His example rests on the premise of war, detailing how slaughter is justified “in the name of necessity” (Foucault, 1978: 137). The UAE is not engaged in any war in this sense – however, the deaths of these construction workers is on the behalf of those already residing in or attracted to the UAE by low tax rates and the futuristic appeal of skylines such as Dubai’s. Here, the government has created an image which employers realize – that of the UAE as a financial hub of the future, complete with soaring glass towers and labyrinthine shopping centres, a monument to consumption and consumerism. Death no longer must be justified in the name of necessity; it can now be justified in the name of opulence.  

Anatomo-politics makes up the individual half of the theory of biopolitics. It focuses on the reconstitution of man as “a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces” (Foucault, 1978: 139). Its direct relation to power is in the extent to which the powerful body can perform this reconstitution. In making man a machine, it necessitates dehumanisation, as the valuation of the individual becomes what they can do, and how effectively they can do it. Migrant workers are dehumanised and broken down to such an extent that they do not feel part of the population – the government does not concern itself with their wellbeing, and they are herded to labour camps on the edges of cities. Their life becomes work – they do not have time for anything else, they cannot access any space that isn’t the camp or the construction site. The individual is not only deemed a machine but comes to think of themself as a machine. A machine cannot die – it can only break, and with so many other tools at the employer’s disposal, the broken machine is discarded.  

Foucault notes that power’s highest function may have shifted; it is “no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through” (Foucault, 1978: 139). The employers of the UAE can push life to its limits, to the point of death in many cases. They need not exercise the threat of death as a punishment, as their workforce has already been manipulated and reconstituted to have no other alternative – obey to live has replaced obey or die.  

Despite its usefulness, Foucault’s theory does have its limits. Crucially, it focuses on points of crisis, such as war or genocide, as being the situations when the ultimate expression of these forms of power come into being. Berlant offers a more nuanced perspective, stating that slow death is “a defining fact of life for a given population that lives it as a fact in ordinary time” (Berlant, 2007: 760). Construction workers in the UAE are not only physically worn down, but consciously deprived of basic liberties; so much so, that they internalise the fact that they are not part of the public, but are instead simply their job title. Despite protests, and reform in other GCC states, there is no indication the government will do anything to help them. The Ministry of Labour fails the migrant worker at every conceivable turn, so much so that its presence becomes phantasmic; the reality for the migrant worker is dominated slow death, the deterioration normalised to justify the push towards the future.  

Another way in which Berlant phrases slow death is “structurally motivated attrition” (Berlant, 2007: 761). This definition again builds on Foucault, as it recognises that the distribution of power may not exclusively be top-down – it can be an intersectional attempt to degenerate certain persons. Both the government and employers disregard the humanity of the migrant construction worker; agents at multiple sites are complicit. Additionally, the structural motivation behind this treatment helps to normalise it, especially when this vast group of the population is voiceless by design.

Conclusion

To conclude, the migrant construction labourer is dead by design. They have been stripped of their identity, stripped of their humanity, and mechanised; and this process has been met with mostly indifference. The government of the UAE has absconded all responsibility for their livelihood, and left them in the care of employers who engage in a system comparable to slavery to obtain their workforce, and segregate them from the rest of humanity, and human contact, to further reduce their personhood. When one dies, if the death is even recorded, it does little to change practices; construction activity in the UAE is on an upwards trajectory (Illankoon, 2022), and this is only likely to continue. The normalisation of their subjugation has led to their lives being disposable, and those with the power to change the system either are  disinterested in changing it, or actively participating in maintaining it.  

Further work can be done – issues of racism are also reported to be prevalent, as are cases of gendered discrimination, leading in some cases to forced prostitution (Sönmez et al., 2013). Additionally, this work focuses exclusively on the construction sector – a comparative with the treatment of domestic or hospitality workers could illuminate other manners in which the power to subjugate and oppress is used. It is likely that the GCC will only become a more and more crucial area to understand as time goes by – they, by no account, are planning on slipping into obscurity, continually developing their hospitality sectors and tourist draws, the World Cup being the most major recent example of that. The forms of power that operate within the UAE – the mechanisms by which they came to be and the methods which reproduce them – must be understood if any effective action is going to be taken against them. 

Globally, the erosion of personhood and domination over the humanity of an exploited workforce must be studied. These practices are not unique to the UAE and exist far outside the sphere of construction. Utilising the framework presented here - the production of the worker, and what impact this has on their perceived humanness, read alongside theories of power production – could provide for a more developed understanding of the human cost of progress.  

Bibliography

The abuse and exploitation of migrant workers in the UAE (2019) ICFUAE. ICFUAE. Available at: https://www.icfuae.org.uk/research-and-publications-briefings/abuse-and-exploitation-migrant-workers-uae%C2%A0 (Accessed: December 22, 2022).  

Berlant, L. (2007) “Slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency),” Critical Inquiry, 33(4), pp. 754–780. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/521568.  

Dajani, H. (2021) Construction workers strike on Abu Dhabi's Reem Island, The National. The National. Available at: https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/construction-workers-strike-on-abu-dhabi-s-reem-island-1.948820 (Accessed: December 20, 2022).  

Federal Supreme Council and Federal Supreme Council (1980) UAE Federal Law No. 8 of 1980. Abu Dhabi: UAE Official Gazette.  

Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. 1st edn. New York, New York: Pantheon.  

Ghaemi, H. (2006) Building Towers, cheating workers, Human Rights Watch. HRW. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2006/11/11/building-towers-cheating-workers/exploitation-migrant-construction-workers-united (Accessed: December 16, 2022).  

Hamza, S. (2015) “Migrant Labour in the Arabian Gulf; A case study of Dubai,” Pursuit, 6(1), pp. 81–133.  

Harmassi, M. (2009) Bahrain to end 'slavery' system, BBC News. BBC. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8035972.stm (Accessed: December 20, 2022).  

Illankoon, K. (2022) Middle East construction gains momentum despite supply chain disruption and rising construction costs, Construction Business News Middle East. Construction Business News Middle East. Available at: https://www.cbnme.com/analysis/middle-east-construction-gains-momentum-despite-supply-chain-disruption-and-rising-construction-costs/ (Accessed: December 18, 2022).  

ILO (2010) United Arab Emirates, International Labour Organization. ILO. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/safety-and-health-at-work/country-profiles/arab-states/emirates/WCMS_150919/lang--en/index.htm (Accessed: December 21, 2022).  

Mahdi, M. (2009) Bahrain: Decree 79 aims at ending sponsor system, International Labour Organization. ILO. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/news/WCMS_143009/lang--en/index.htm (Accessed: December 21, 2022).  

Mbembe, A. (2003) “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15(1), pp. 11–40. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.  

McQue, K. (2022) Up to 10,000 Asian migrant workers die in the Gulf every year, claims report, The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/mar/11/up-to-10000-asian-migrant-workers-die-in-the-gulf-every-year-claims-report (Accessed: December 21, 2022).  

Ngeh , J. and Pelican, M. (2018) “Intersectionality and the Labour Market in the United Arab Emirates: The Experiences of African Migrants.,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 143(2), pp. 171–194. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26899770 (Accessed: 2022).  

Page, M. (2022) FIFA president's 'I feel like a migrant worker' speech misleading, Human Rights Watch. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/11/21/fifa-presidents-i-feel-migrant-worker-speech-misleading (Accessed: December 20, 2022).  

Pattison, P. (2021) Revealed: 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded, The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/revealed-migrant-worker-deaths-qatar-fifa-world-cup-2022 (Accessed: December 20, 2022).  

Seghedoni, S. (2017) United Arab Emirates: Where construction never sleeps, ceramica.info. Tile. Available at: https://www.ceramica.info/en/articoli/united-arab-emirates-where-construction-never-sleeps/ (Accessed: December 21, 2022).  

Slater, J. and Colville , E. (2014) Collective Bargaining Rights of employees in the UAE, Global Workplace Insider. Available at: https://www.globalworkplaceinsider.com/2014/04/collective-bargaining-rights-of-employees-in-the-uae/ (Accessed: December 16, 2022).  

Sönmez, S. et al. (2013) Human rights and health disparities for migrant workers in the UAE, Health and Human Rights Journal. HHR. Available at: https://www.hhrjournal.org/2013/08/human-rights-and-health-disparities-for-migrant-workers-in-the-uae/ (Accessed: December 18, 2022).  

Vital Signs (2022) THE DEATHS OF MIGRANTS IN THE GULF. rep. Vital Signs. Available at: https://fairsq.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Vital_signs-report-1.pdf. 

Expanding the canon

Expanding the canon: the case for the reflexive inclusion of epochal memoirs as forms of auto-ethnography, and for utilising the work of non-anthropologists

By Daniel Guthrie

In his 2022 book, A Waiter in Paris, Edward Chisholm details his experience working in a Parisian restaurant – an occupation he found to be “governed by archaic rules and a petty hierarchy” (Chisholm, 2022, pg. 12). In this work, he not only analyses the restaurant structure from within, but also describes the p the stratification in the restaurant and in broader society. He gives his reason for writing the book as to give a voice to an invisible workforce, and make people reflect on the lives, and quality of life, of the people who serve them. I define this type of writing - an account of a specific lived experience of the author - as an 'epochal memoirs'  

When I first read the text earlier this year, I was enamoured, and described it to others as a ‘pseudo-ethnography’. It contains all the features an ethnography should: details of the site of survey (both the bistro itself, and of the decrepit hotel and shoebox room-rentals he resided in); detailed accounts to conversation between himself and the various research participants he engages with (other waiters, the elderly sommelier, the dictatorial manager, and the willowy, elegant hostess he falls for); and conclusions drawn from his study (about the structure of French society, and the need for greater acknowledgement of catering staff). Yet, despite these features, I added the prefix of ‘pseudo’, relegating the trove to a mere piece of entertainment.  

I now realise I should’ve taken it seriously, and properly entertained its serious purpose. I had succumbed to the haughty trappings of the ivory tower of academia; I didn’t take the book seriously because it would not be put on my reading lists, it would not be picked up by the LSE library, and I bought it from a regular bookshop (the wonderful oddity that is Word on the Water) rather than from a digitized list of academic resources. I argue that valuing texts based purely on their adherence to anthropological forms and standards is detrimental to the discipline. Why should a piece of work have to be published in Current Anthropology to have anthropological relevance? Why must a phonebook of noted pedagogues be listed under the ‘Bibliography’ section before a text is even considered to be of value? In a discipline so dedicated to analysing hierarchies in order to undermine or question their foundations, why is our internal hierarchy so entrenched? 

The answers to these questions are murky and abstruse. Indeed, in writing this article, I became engaged in an internal struggle about whether to include citations, and furthermore, whether to cite academics. Would it emphasise my point if I constructed my argument without reference or inclusion to the institutions I just lambasted, or would it instead display some petulancy that rests in my subconscious if I refused to acknowledge value in the hard work of learned professionals, and the norms they have adopted? I concluded it would be to my detriment to not pay some regard to academia – some work does provide benefit to my argument. Yet I have tried to use academic citations descriptively, to illustrate my points with greater clarity rather than  to prove that what I believe has value.  

I have came to the conclusion that some anthropologists may not be ‘Anthropologists’, and this is no bad thing. By this I mean that some work that could be considered ethnographic may not be produced by people who have studied anthropology and intend to do fieldwork in a standardised way – it comes about from wanting to platform their, and others, experiences. Entering an environment with the status of ‘researcher’ carries with it a host of assumptions, from colonial ideas of the enlightened being as the centre of knowledge-production, to the inevitability that people act differently when they know they are being observed. The value of experimental approaches to ethnography is recognised by some anthropologists, as evidenced in the text Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Sciences (Bejarano et al., 2019). Whilst initially being the project of two institutional anthropologists, the contribution of their research assistants was so significant they were listed as co-authors. The assistants themselves were undocumented immigrants, alongside being activists for the rights of undocumented peoples (Bejarano et al., 2019). The effect of participating in anthropological research, despite not being trained or even knowing what anthropology was before interacting with the academics, was transformative; by the end of the project, “ethnography had changed them and they had changed ethnography” (Bejarano et al., 2019, pg. 13).  

This illustrates the value of contributors to the canon ‘finding’ anthropology, and not being subject to the regiment of Malinowski, Boas, Geertz, and Foucault. However, I believe the argument can be taken further, to encompass those who are not intentionally participating in anthropological research. The value of work like Chisholm’s, or its spiritual forefather, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, is that the authors authentically straddle a participant/observer divide, and as such, develop a far more honest portrait of the subject matter.  

Another reason to expand the canon in this manner is to diversify it. This would not function exclusively to reintroduce “anthropology’s long-neglected ancestors” (Mogstad & Tse, 2018, pg. 57) – figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, or Ella Deloria - but also to absorb literature such as slave narratives, or first-person accounts of colonial India from the Indian perspective. These writings are foundational accounts for many of the issues of racism and colonialism still being discussed in anthropology. It would expand the discipline if we treated these texts as valid ethnographies, rather than ignoring them and instead referring to the host of canonical intellectuals. It would also radically alter the base of epistemology, with anthropologists humbly taking a seat and seeing what the primary knowledge of those subjugated by western powers can teach us. Even if research participants are deeply involved in formulating theory, it is the labour of the anthropologist in interpreting their words and actions that is deemed to be of real value. This reproduces a power dynamic in which the research participants are not given the regard they deserve. Respecting primary sources that are fundamental to the issues anthropology justifies itself with is not only crucial to expanding the canon, but also vital in efforts to decolonise the discipline and decentralise power from the western institution.  

Critiques for expanding the canon in the way I have argued could come in a variety of forms. One of these may be the issue of form – these texts are not written how anthropology is normally written. They do not vie for academic credibility, instead emphasising readability, or descriptive value. Yet these forms may not be  as dissimilar as  initially thought. Anthropologists such as Faye Harrison have constructed readable and intellectual texts, and the necessity to have a dictionary within reaching distance as you choke trying to digest convoluted multi-syllables should not mean the article is more academically valid. Similarly, some may object to the writing being in the first person, arguing anthropology should use more scientific, detached language. Autoethnographies are regularly written in first person and have been a staple of anthropology for decades – texts such as Becoming, belonging, and the fear of everything Black by Lydia Ocasio-Stoutenburg work as both a study of bureaucracy, and a deeply personal  epochal memoir about the difficulties of navigating a society as a black mother with a black child who has Downs Syndrome (Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2021). What should be emphasised is the use of general anthropological methodologies, such as those Chisholm uses – if you can extract conclusions about the site of study, the actors within these sites, and the composition of society that created these conditions, your work should be entertained as scholarship.   

It can also be argued that the same scrutiny is not devoted to epochal memoirs as is applied to anthropology from the institution. However, ethnographies exist where locations cannot be mentioned, and names and significant details are changed; such is the case in studies of drug dealers of government operations. This necessary secrecy makes it impossible to perform checks on their truthfulness. We rely on the honesty of our peers and their findings, especially given the emphasis of anthropology on finding a new point of research, both geographically and theoretically. I would argue that if an epochal memoir reaches any degree of popularity, it is subject to a far greater degree of scrutiny than most anthropological work.  

To bring this argument to a close, I believe epochal memoirs that exhibit general anthropological traits but do not openly deem themselves as anthropological should be included in the canon. From introducing new, fluid, and invested methodologies of ethnographies, to departures from the general form of anthropological writing, and the decentralisation of power from the western institution, the inclusion of these works could open the doors of anthropology. Formulating flexibility within the rigid rules that validate certain forms of anthropological knowledge over others could rescue anthropology from its state of perpetual crisis. To overcome our ethical dilemmas about the purpose of anthropology, we must embrace knowledge produced from the bottom up. 

---

Bibliography 

Bejarano, C. et al. (2019) Decolonizing ethnography: Undocumented immigrants and New Directions in social science. Durham and London: Duke University Press.  

Chisholm, E. (2022) A Waiter in Paris. London, London: Octopus.  

Mogstad, H. and Tse, L.-S. (2018) “Decolonizing Anthropology: Reflections from Cambridge,” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 36(2), pp. 53–72. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2018.360206.  

Ocasio-Stoutenburg, L. (2021) “Becoming, belonging, and the fear of Everything Black: Autoethnography of a minority-mother-scholar-advocate and the movement toward justice,” Race Ethnicity and Education, 24(5), pp. 607–622. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2021.1918401.  

Death in the Anthropology Department

In pursuit of Afar nomads

Just over 45 years ago Glynn Flood, my friend and co-PhD student in the LSE Anthropology department, was bayoneted to death by agents of the then Ethiopian government, along with hundreds of the ‘Afar nomads he had been studying in the Danakil desert.

It took a while for Michèle (Glynn’s widow) and Glynn’s father, going back out to Ethiopia together and then to Djibouti where some of his ‘Afar friends had fled, to piece together how, where and why Glynn had died.

In fact the seeds of disaster had been only too presciently spelled-out in an article he had written for RAI News (now Anthropology Today), earlier in 1975: “Nomadism and its future: the ‘Afar”.

The ‘Afar pastured their animals on the floor of the wide shallow Awash river valley, the river running down from the Ethiopian Highlands, through their territory, and petering out in salt lakes on the Djibouti borders.  As has always been true for pastoralists all over the Sahel and in the drier parts of Ethiopia and East Africa, herds range far and wide right after the rains, just as wild animals do. But at the end of the dry season when there are intense water and grazing shortages, herders take their animals back to dry season camps near permanent water. And in the case of the ‘Afar this was on the banks of the river Awash. They can only make use of the remoter rain fed areas, which provide grazing for millions of valuable animals during the wet season, if the fall-back camps exist for them from February to June in the very driest months.

However, from the 1960s onwards the World Bank and other donors began to encourage the Ethiopian government in the Highlands to grow irrigated cotton on the flat fertile floodplains on either side of the river Awash, right where these essential dry season camps existed.   No effort was made to understand ‘Afar needs or the logic of their annual movements. Tensions grew during a major famine in Ethiopia in 1973, and conflict between highlander cotton farmers and ‘Afar pastoralists continued to intensify over the next year or two. Eventually, in one of many skirmishes, Glynn and many of his friends and contacts were killed by a detachment of the Ethiopian army.

For us in the Anthropology department, students and staff alike, the shock of his death transfixed us. We PhD students had lost a good friend, one of the brightest of our cohort, under truly terrible circumstances. For the academic staff, it was the first time a PhD student had been sent into the field and been killed there. It called into question a great deal about the duty of care that supervisors should have for their students, about how closely staff should follow the politics of the countries where their students were working, and about whether – when – Glynn should have been told to come home.

Michèle lovingly looked after his papers for many years, but the notes were half in ‘Afar and half in English and she was unable to do anything with them alone. Miraculously two Ethiopian scholars (Jean Lydall and Maknun Ashami) were recently able to obtain funding (from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany through its Director Prof. Günther Schlee) to take his work forward. With the help of Michèle, his field notes and letters home were finally published as a monograph, ‘In pursuit of ‘Afar nomads’. A true labour of love.

The book was launched in London at the Royal Anthropological Institute in the summer of 2019, along with an exhibition of his superb photographs. Many of us who had known him were present or took part, sharing in the deep satisfaction, alongside the sadness, of the final completion and rounding off of an unfinished story.

Words by Gill Shepherd

To Touch Is to Tremble

Unanticipated intimacies of care in Taiwanese gay erotic massage

“Does my hand tremble when I touch him?”

We must imagine John asks this when he attends to his client during a massage session. John is a masseur, one of several whose experiences of working in Taiwanese gay erotic massage are presented in Chen’s (2018) ethnography.

Chen makes several key points about bodywork and intimacy in his fieldwork. Firstly, Chen argues that intimacy and bodywork incorporate affective and corporeal relations in gay erotic massage. Affective embodiment leads to the ‘empathetic and transformative capacity of touching’. Chen connects gay erotic massage to Taiwanese cultural contexts where masseurs perceive their work as moral and aligned with the caring ethic of ‘Buddhist merit accumulation’.

One of John’s clients has a disabled arm and a scar on his thigh after a traffic accident. This evokes John’s compassion, and he describes how he felt when he saw the scar:

‘While touching the scar, I was wondering why such a terrible thing could happen to someone that marked his life forever. I felt I could understand the hard time he had been through. I was trying my best to massage his thigh, to relieve his suffering. I wished his miseries could just end here.’ (Chen 2018: 645)

In response to Chen’s perspectives on intimacy and affective embodiment, this essay argues that John experiences ‘trembling’ when he touches his client. This term is used to describe the ambivalence John feels, between disgust towards a body type figured as imperfect and undesirable, and sympathy for the suffering of the client. The experience is ‘intermediate’ (Throop, 2009), holds contradictory emotions simultaneously and prompts John to respond ethically to the particularity of the client’s pain and emotional needs.

Trembling, then, is the experience of ‘variations’, which describes the multiple potentialities of becoming that John may enact into the possible, but before remained virtual and unactualised (see Biehl 2010 on Deleuze). But as ‘trembling’ suggests, it is up for discussion whether John successfully contains and chooses between these multiple possibilities of action or rather ends up reproducing new conditions of uncertainty about how to appropriately demonstrate care.

Merleau-Ponty on the body, and the ‘affective turn’

For Merleau-Ponty, ask not what the body is, but what it does. The French phenomenologist was interested in embodiment as the merger between the subject and the world as object, where the act of perceiving and interacting constitutes our sense of self, whilst at the same time being constantly in flux and negotiating change.

Merleau-Ponty’s embodied self has radical implications for describing an intersubjective and intercorporeal self which acquires a sense of selfhood from touch. We are almost always touching something - the clothes on our back or the ground beneath our feet - where we are consistently shaped by this touch before we even begin to touch others. In Maclaren’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty, she describes the ‘strange ambiguity’ of the body as both sentient and sensible, representing ‘active’ and ‘passive’ senses - but the very meaning of these terms are blurred when we are transformed by touch or invite touch ourselves (2013: 97). Merleau-Ponty describes this as ‘perceptible-percipience’ (1964: 167), which means the easy reversibility of touch where the one touching is transformed by the one being touched and vice versa.

Affect theory supplements Merleau-Ponty’s perspective by explaining how emotion may not arise as an innate drive from the interiorised self, but from the exchange of affect in the relationalities of a situation (Paterson, 2007; Blackman and Venn, 2010).

Applying this concept to John and his client, we observe how touching becomes an intercorporeal, bi-directional exchange of affective energy where both enter an embodied process of self-transformation. The client does not just passively receive care, but invites it, relates his life story with John and comes out healed and accepted by John as a valued bodily-person. Meanwhile, John does the massage, but must listen and respond appropriately to his client’s needs. The reversibility of roles and indeterminate nature of the massage creates the ‘unanticipated intimacy’ which arises from unscripted care and the excitement of uncertainty (Walby, 2012)

Implications for the queer body and the caring ethic

More broadly, Chen’s research challenges the ‘happy queer’ which excludes the presence and portrayal of disabled or aged bodies in queer communities (Ahmed, 2010; Kulick and Rydström, 2015). The massage is the site of potential relationalities and intimacies which accept the ‘rejected body’ and create a limited form of inclusivity (Chen, 2018: 646).

Moreover, Chen argues that in Taiwanese cultural context, masseurs defend their practice by referring to the Buddhist concept of merit accumulation and argue that their practice becomes a caring ethic for the sexually marginalized. 

This links to other phenomenological discussions of ethics in anthropology. Throop (2009) discusses attunement as a mode of ethical belonging and living morally with others, while Zigon (2014) discusses attunement and fidelity as paired modes of ethical being with others; where fidelity requires reflection to repair relations after moments of moral breakdown. Particular acts of embodied care have the potential then to form enduring relations of authentic and ethical being with others.

Trembling reconciles Merleau-Ponty’s perspective on the singular and unitary individual constituted by the act of perceiving through affect theory’s radical turn into affective intensities that assemble the ‘individual’. It does this by leaning towards Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the individual body as the site for potential action, but anticipates the affective critique by arguing that the body exists within multiplicities of affective, or effective, action - which this essay describes as variations.

This has wider implication on the study of affective embodiment in fields like male sex work which has previously been left under-explored, as well as pointing to future research into the moral dimension and dynamics of intimacy unique to sex work.

Words by Sean Chou

Bibliography

Ahmed, S. 2010. The promise of happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Biehl, J. & Locke, P. 2010. Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming. Current anthropology, 51(3), pp.317–351.

Blackman, L., & Venn, C. 2010. Affect. Body & Society, 16, 1–5

Chen, B.W., 2018. Touching intimacy: Bodywork, affect and the caring ethic in erotic gay massage in Taiwan. Gender, work, and organization, 25(6), pp.637–652.

Kulick, D., & Rydström, J. 2015. Loneliness and its opposite: Sex, disability, and the ethics of engagement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. and Fisher, A.L., 1963. The structure of behavior (p. 131). Boston: Beacon Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Philosopher and his Shadow. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964

Merleau-Ponty, M. & Smith, Colin, 2002. Phenomenology of perception, London: Routledge.

Maclaren, K., 2014. Touching matters: Embodiments of intimacy. Emotion, space and society, 13, pp.95–102.

Paterson, M. 2007. Affecting touch: Towards a felt phenomenology of therapeutic touch. In J. Davidson, L. Bondi, & M. Smith (Eds.), Emotional geographies (pp. 161–176). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Throop, C.J., 2009. Intermediary Varieties of Experience. Ethnos, 74(4), pp.535–558.

Throop, C.J., 2017. Despairing Moods: Worldly Attunements and Permeable Personhood in Yap. Ethos (Berkeley, Calif.), 45(2), pp.199–215.

Tahhan, D.A., 2010. Blurring the Boundaries between Bodies: Skinship and Bodily Intimacy in Japan. Japanese studies, 30(2), pp.215–230.

Walby, K. 2012. Touching encounters: Sex work and male‐for‐male Internet escorting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Zigon, J., 2014. Attunement and fidelity: two ontological conditions for morally being-in-the-world. Ethos (Berkeley, Calif.), 42(1), pp.16–30.

Why does Finance Benefit only the Wealthy?

The transformation of the financial sector has almost exclusively benefitted the wealthy – Why do we accept that?

David Graeber famously said that "there is an inverse relationship between the amount of money you're going to get for a job, and how much it actually helps people" (Moreau, 2019). No industry could be a better example of that than finance. While having gone through an unprecedented transformation since the late 1970s, nearly everything finance has focused on is paying elite educated workers tons of money so they can focus on enriching a tiny already wealthy minority of the population through highly complex financial instruments. The added value for the broader society has been probably even negative.

Why? Because not all of us have access to elite education and/or exorbitant wealth to join the club of modern finance beneficiaries, while all of us pay taxes that are used to bail out those same institutions that we have never benefitted from. Let's explore further what the transformation of the financial sector has looked like, why it reduces economic growth, increases risks of financial crises, and fosters economic inequality.

Back in the early 1970s, working in a bank was considered quite dull. Workers were neither more educated nor better paid than those in other sectors, which seemed reasonable because task complexity was comparably low, while routine work was almost omnipresent (Reshef & Philippon, 2009). Furthermore, finance was heavily regulated at that time – lessons learned from the Great Depression being partially caused by banks' reckless behaviour in a deregulated market – and it mostly focused on two areas: credit intermediation and insurance. With the deregulation of the financial sector – beginning in the early 1980s – another branch of finance started gaining steam – in the literature mostly called "other finance". What it entailed were derivatives, securities, venture capital, hedge funds, and so forth. According to estimates by Deutsche Bank Research, the size of the OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives market by the end of 2012 was $633 trillion, 9 to 10 times the size of the world economy at that time (Kaya et al., 2013), which signified how important the financial sector had become since the 1980s.

It also changed the requirements for workers in finance drastically. To engage with those complex financial instruments, elite levels of education were all of a sudden required, and compensation simultaneously had to go through the roof to attract that kind of talent (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Relative Wage and Education in the Financial industry compared to the non-farm private sector (Reshef & Philippon, 2009, P. 49).

But why should we care about how finance today is different from finance in the Bretton-Woods-System? Simply put, because it has influenced every aspect of our economic system – from productivity over economic growth to wages and investment behaviour of corporations. That's why economists sometimes label our current economic system finance capitalism. Finance has not only changed itself; it has changed almost everything surrounding it, and not for the better.

Let's take economic growth as an example. Proponents of modern-day finance argue tirelessly how it leads to more efficient capital allocation in the market, boosting economic growth and, consequently, everyone benefits. That broad claim is debatable at best and highly misleading at worst. A study by Law and Singh (2014, P. 36) finds that "the level of financial development is beneficial to growth only up to a certain threshold," whereas above that threshold, financialization harms economic growth. When looking at GDP per capita growth in the United States, it is not changing significantly compared to the pre-financial-transformation era (World Bank, 2020).

On the contrary, the increase of financial crises since the collapse of the Bretton-Woods-System has caused significant dips in economic growth. Ironically, Deutsche Bank Research argues that the "near exponential growth of finance and its liberalization since this point has encouraged this trend [of increased numbers of financial crises]" (Reid et al., 2017, P. 3).  Too bad its mother company is not doing much to reverse that trend – to put it mildly.

Additionally, after financial crises, governments worldwide tend to impose austerity measures that hit poor and middle-class families the hardest, while the rich are either not impacted or even benefitting. While public services, such as education, public transportation, and affordable housing in the US have been cut in the aftermath of the financial crisis, 91% of all new income between 2009 and 2012 went to the top 1% of the income distribution (Carter, 2012; Saez, 2015).

So, on top of not contributing to an increase in economic growth while causing more financial crises, modern finance is also fostering income inequality – and not just because austerity widens the gap between the rich and the poor.

It is also because of the compensation structure and those who work in finance. As mentioned before, due to the increased complexity of financial products, education requirements for workers have gone through the roof. The top financial institutions hire almost exclusively from elite Ivy League Colleges (Rivera, 2016). In a world where more students from households in the top 1% of the income distribution are admitted to those universities than from the entire bottom half (Chetty et al., 2020), hiring exclusively elite educated students for extremely high paying jobs perpetuates a vicious cycle of the rich getting richer.

Furthermore, the purpose of this new financial sector is almost exclusively to enrich the wealthy. Doing high-speed trading of stocks to maximize profits is beneficial for those who have the financial resources to participate in the stock market. But, when stock ownership – like in the US – is incredibly unequally distributed, with the wealthiest 10% of households owning 84% of all stocks and the bottom 50% having none at all (Wolff, 2017), all it does is enriching an already wealthy minority, while not generating any added value for the rest of society. The same is true for derivatives trading, as it benefits only those who can afford to participate in those trillion-dollar markets, which are hardly accessible to the broader population (Turbeville, 2015).

Modern-day finance is the perfect exemplar of what David Graeber meant. Workers are paid insane amounts of money for serving a wealthy minority of the population while not generating benefits for the broader society. From being similar to any other business, finance has transformed itself into a playing field for elite educated career-driven graduates from wealthy backgrounds, who care more about their own careers and status than what their job is doing to the broader society.   

Words by Torben Trapp

Illustration by Andrew Craig

Bibliography

Carter, Z. D. (2012). Austerity's big winners prove to be Wall Street and the wealthy. Huff Post.

 Cecchetti, S. G., & Kharroubi, E. (2015). Why does financial sector growth crowd out real economic growth?. BIS Working Paper.

Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Saez, E., Turner, N., & Yagan, D. (2020). Income segregation and intergenerational mobility across colleges in the united states. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(3), 1567-1633.

 Kaya, O., Speyer, B., AG, D. B., & Hoffmann, R. (2013). Reforming OTC derivatives markets. DB Research, Deutsche Bank Frankfurt am Main, August.

 Law, S. H., & Singh, N. (2014). Does too much finance harm economic growth?. Journal of Banking & Finance, 41, 36-44.

 Moreau, A. S. (2019). David Graeber on capitalism's best kept secret – Income and utility are inversely proportional. Philonomist.

Reid, J., Nicol, C., Burns, N., & Chanda, S. (2017). Long-term asset return study: The next financial crisis. Deutsche Bank Market Research, Deutsche Banks.

 Reshef, A., & Philippon, T. (2009). Wages and human capital in the US financial industry: 1909–2006. Working Paper - National Bureau of Economic Research.

 Rivera, L. A. (2016). Pedigree: How elite students get elite jobs. Princeton University Press.

 Saez, E. (2015). The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (updated with 2014 preliminary estimates). University of California, Berkeley, Working Paper. Retrieved from: http://eml. berkeley. edu/~ saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012. pdf.

 Turbeville, W. (2015). Finance is to blame for rise in inequality. Time.

 Wolff, E. N. (2017). Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2016: Has Middle Class Wealth Recovered? (No. 24085). National Bureau of Economic Research.

 World Bank. (2029). GDP per capita growth (annual %) – United States. World Bank Database.

Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?

The dangers of the corporatisation of social media

Before entering the “Age of Information”, humanity’s social organisation was exclusively confined to a corporeal reality. Today, it gradually becomes fastened to an abstract realm. 

Companies such as Microsoft and Google are clutching their newfound power as the communicative mediators of the 21st century. The value of Facebook Inc has now doubled since 2016, surpassing a market share of more than $760B. The topic of Big Tech continues to slowly encroach upon all areas of political debate, as our personal, political and social identities become perpetually shadowed by a silhouette of algorithms and data. But as the intangible forces of digital networks strengthen, we are led to ask one pertinent question: Is the growing domination of private internet conglomerates threatening democratic prosperity in contemporary liberal societies?  

The digital era is reshuffling the constitutions of political expression, introducing new methods by which the public are able to traverse governmental affairs. In lieu of traditional media such as television and print, we increasingly rely on Twitter to break new political paradigms. The networking giant, has arguably solidified itself as the fastest political mediator in the history of the Anthropocene. But more-so, its influence over communication is redefining the relationship between citizens and their elected government leaders, as content moderation becomes increasingly equated with censorship - on both sides of the political spectrum. 

 On the 6th of January, the illicit attack on the US Capitol building by anti-Biden protestors was largely attributed to a ‘digital’ groupthink, or, more specifically, far-right online social media circles, who used alternative ‘free speech platforms’ to orchestrate their disorderly riots. An event which soon came to resemble that of a coup d’état, resulted in the decision by Facebook and Twitter to block Donald Trump’s social media account. 

Public communication is gradually becoming ever-more regulated by privatised corporations, organisations on which we increasingly rely on to report decisions made within the state. The autonomy to break and regulate governmental affairs is now being granted to independent conglomerates, who have historically demonstrated a greater propensity towards fulfilling individualised corporate interests, instead of prioritising efforts to meet the democratic ideal. Most will probably be familiar with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which uncovered the exploitations and data misuse of over 87 million Facebook users, influencing the outcomes of hundreds of elections across the globe. With close links to the Conservative Party, Cambridge Analytica had no consent before choosing to construe millions of social media timelines, manipulating voters on an industrial scale, and infiltrating news feeds with politically-bias content. But despite the inconceivable negligence and injustice at play (details of which we may never exactly know), social and institutional privilege is what first springs to mind when learning that the perpetrators were able to get away, without serving any prison time for their far-reaching digital crimes. 

Arguably, transformations within our information environment haven’t occurred in such a profound fashion, at least not since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in circa 1439. Although the internet has produced an unfathomable degree of benefits for human civilisation, such as instant communication and rapid access to knowledge, the line between objective truth and subjective opinion is simultaneously becoming blurrier than ever before, as social media algorithms favour engagement over fact. 

Private internet companies are increasingly relying on sensationalism, fake news, and clickbait to drive up engagement, algorithmically situating users into self-affirming echo chambers. The phenomenon which has otherwise been referred to as ‘Blue Feed Red Feed’, is an essential pitfall used by internet companies, who have failed to provide a visible enough baseline regarding scientific truths and universal political facts above the sea information engulfing the society in the contemporary age. As highlighted in Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth: “social media connects users with like-minded members, and supplies them with customised news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in even narrower windowless silos”. The internet has created infinite opportunities to construct reality — and for one, may be interpreted as pushing the democratisation of information beyond our wildest dreams. But the wisdom of the crowd, has overpopulated the information domain to unbounded extents, as we collectively struggle to distinguish truth from falsehood. 

Data, when commodified on mass scales, is indisputably becoming one of the most valuable assets circulating in the economy. Jared Lanier, a former Silicon Valley computer scientist, regarded as the ‘father of virtual reality’, has vigorously advocated for the general public to delete their Facebook accounts, fighting for a new system of exchange which envisions users being paid for their personal data. Deteriorating regulations, lower trade barriers and a shifting consensus towards even stronger individualised economic liberalisation, has granted monopolies such as Twitter, Facebook and Google an overarching power to influence the circulation and consumption of all online property, both commercial and political.

In ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, grasps this decennial concern in comprehensive depths. As outlined throughout her book, the conversion of human behaviour into mere data points is achieved through cookie captures on purchasing habits, but also other profitable markers, such as political dispositions, private interests and, increasingly, our physical environments (think Amazon Alexa and Pokémon Go). Transactional user information now symbolises a “behavioural surplus”, which is fragmented and analysed by third parties, packaged virtually as predictability products, and finally re-invested through Facebook’s machine learning algorithms, to be circulated as commodified data. The unspoken imperative of digital culture gives us little choice but to ‘accept the cookies’ and hand over our autonomy to a group of internet oligarchs, who are either tied to, or are themselves, wealthy partisans. The companies we’ve become so deeply dependent on, are threatening our inalienable right to democracy. 

Social media apps are additionally employing AI and machine learning to power their algorithms, individualising user timelines intricately and exhaustively, making personalisation the contemporary consensus. In 2019, the United States threatened to ban the application TikTok, which has previously been criticised for its detrimental influences on mental health, its consistent leaks and breaches of data, and its strong possibility in becoming a latent data funnel towards China’s Communist Party. Despite the available studies on screen time, internet conglomerates are still employing consumer psychologists to tune up the compulsivity of their algorithms, borrowing gambling methods from Las Vegas casinos to create intentional “psychological cravings”.

Law violations, across a global political discourse, detrimentally open opportunity to spread incorrect information through Facebook ads, and caps on governmental speech, coupled with a formidable manipulation of mobile applications, leave us questioning where we stand in our unification as one civil body. Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ and Orwell’s ‘1984’, are becoming more pertinent than ever before, mirroring the dystopian shifts which now seem to be materialising around us. As a weakening confidence in democratic prosperity plagues the Western world, ungovernable forces such as the COVID-19 pandemic have further decayed all means of social collectivism. ‘Social distancing’ has now entered our everyday vernacular, reaffirming the cataclysmic changes taking place in Britain and the United States, amplifying the political, social and economic shift towards even greater neoliberal individualisation. Big Tech now depends on the data of the public to sustain and drive-up profits, and consistently remain one step ahead of the judiciary system. As the foundations of political egalitarianism are shaken, democratic prosperity stands under direct threat, leaving us questioning the emerging potentials of a highly centralised power structure, as we seep deeper into the “Digital Revolution”.  

 Words by Teo Canmetin

Illustration by Teo Canmetin

Britain's Corruptocracy

The corruptocracy behind Britain’s claim to supreme democracy

Incompetent, mean-spirited, feckless, adulterous, ugly… are all feasible descriptions of our incumbent Tory Government, and almost certainly pertain to the Prime Minister. However, in perceiving the rottenest elements of our leadership, all of these descriptors miss the point: we live in a corruptocracy, and when the ship sinks we'll all go down.

The wrecking begins like this: riding into high office in the wake of HMS Brexit, members of the ‘Leave Government’ have relied on fable and historical mistruth. The United Kingdom, these faux-nationalists tell us, has a supreme claim to democracy. In this Genesis myth, Britain with its dark satanic mills ploughed forward into modernity, sprouting a new middle-class and an exploited understrata. Then, as the story goes, representation of the understrata became a necessity for stability – only we understood this of course, and hence our uniquely enfranchised political system. This ahistorical assertion that Britain ‘does democracy best because it’s the oldest’ is compounded by imperial claims, depicting democracy as our proudest export. Finally, grand ideas that we uphold principles of fair play, equality of political action, and freedom of speech are supported by references to an unbiased BBC, a competitive journalistic arena and incorruptible political institutions.

Contrast this narrative to conversations about populist, fake-news America or Cold War-esque invasive Russia, and our politics comes out looking like a Crufts’ prize poodle. However, this mythology creates complacency about the health of British democracy and conceals the poodle’s prize shite on the carpet, left in the front room of executive power.

The corruption behind the story is three-fold. The inherently cabalist nature of a Government that perceives itself as insurgent, means that loyalty and unity become the primary criterion for a leading role. Job selection is the prerogative of the Prime Minister, however, to appoint individuals who lack experience, aptitude, and then to support these individuals no matter what their mistakes, takes personal preference to the next level of nepotism and corruption.

Take the rise of government-role monopolist, Dido Harding. Harding’s credentials include not only a lucrative career as a business consultant, but a CEO position at TalkTalk when it received a record £400,000 fine for a massive data breach. She studied at Oxford with David Cameron, is married to the Conservative’s anti-corruption champion (!) and oversaw, in the track-and-trace system, one of the largest infrastructure failures in British history. And the sanction? This took the form of an appointment to interim chair of the National Institute for Health and Protection, of course. Although Baroness Harding has been described as ill-equipped and her appointment evidence of cronyism, you cannot fault her durability as a professional. ‘I did not apply for the role’ she has admitted: begging the question, was her expensive tenure as TalkTalk chairman that impressive, or is she merely the beneficiary of high privilege and profitable connections?

The extent to which skewed appointments damage the public interest is enormous. The decision to award a £122 million PPE contract to PPE Medpro is amongst the most questionable. Only having been established 44 days prior to the bid being tendered and boasting a shareholding of a mere £100, the firm – owned by Tory donor and associate of Baroness Mone – secured the contract. Similarly, the deal secured by Henry Mills (senior advisor to Department of Health) for Ayanda capital, worth £256 million, resulted in the dispatch of faulty PPE. And again, UK logistics company Uniserve, was awarded PPE contracts valued at £186 million – its owner is listed as a speaker for the influential pro-Brexit lobby group Prosperity UK. Compounding these individual cases was the release of a report by the National Audit Office, the government spending watchdog. The report concluded that suppliers with favourable political connections were directed to a ‘high priority channel’ for government contracts, increasing their chances of success by ten times. Caricatures of Conservatives as backslapping, pocket-lining, ‘looking out for a mate who was in their brother’s boarding house at school’ is too superficial an analysis to describe actions of this Government during the pandemic. The siphoning off of public money at direct expense of human life is clear corruption – and in its most malicious form.

A third product of Johnson’s parasitic existence as PM is the failure to hold ministers and officials to account. A precedent set by the previous Prime Minister, Theresa May, was the promotion of incompetence. The installation of Chris Grayling into the Department for Transport was amusingly punctuated by his awarding a £50 million channel crossing contract to a firm with no ferries. Johnson has riffed on this Tory tenet of bad governance and refuses to remove high ranking staff, even if they have broken the law. The resignation of Johnson’s advisor on ministerial code, following the suppression of the conclusions of an official report into Priti Patel’s bullying, indicates the legal carte blanche he affords his closest allies. This truth is epitomised in the failure to sack Dominic Cummings following his infamous holiday in Durham, seriously undermining government guidance on safety during the pandemic. The only redeeming element here is watching how the parasite cannibalises itself and any political capital it once had. As senior advisors fall by the wayside and any whiff of legal integrity dissipates, we can sit back and watch the bastards collapse, coughing and spluttering while Tory donors pocket millions flogging dodgy masks.

To call this Government merely incompetent implies an honest motivating backbone hosted by a weak, flabby torso. Instead, the Government suffers from moral scoliosis. This is a Government that has profited in the polls from concocted notions of British identity. Its members and alumni have co-opted a cause and ideology to shell out the institutions they falsely claim to revere. This corruption is of course inherently self-defeating, however when the Captain sinks the ship, we will all drown.

Words by Jamie Miller

Illustration by Andrew Craig